Bibliophile (#TNTHorrorContest)

Bibliophile by C.A. Viruet

I'm not sure when they took over. It was a slow process. For years I collected happily without ever noticing the size of the collection. I would just add a bookshelf, move a few out and keep going. What harm was there in collecting books after all? None that I could see, not then. I had everything I could ever want to read and things that I wasn't sure I wanted to read but I kept them all the same. At one time I watched TV regularly, now I'm not so sure I still have the TV. Right now I am lying in my bed, trying to will myself into getting up. I want to take my notebook outside and write in the sunshine.

They are so close to me. I have a space smaller than a twin bed to sleep in. The rest of the bed is covered in the tools of the trade. Dictionaries, grammar books, literature textbooks. Every morning I wake up and they are a bit closer than the evening before, and often there are more. I noticed this morning that the pile has grown by three literature magazines. They were not there when I crawled into my spot. I counted and memorized what was there before I fell asleep. I hadn't slept in days because of the anxiety of it. Going to bed and waking up to find more reading material nearby is like being trapped in a cage with a tiger that is just ever so slowly moving towards you. I know these books and magazines will be the death of me, but I also know there is nothing I can do about it.

I am sitting on the bed now. I put my feet down and they rested on cold paper. The carpet beneath the bed is no longer visible. Yesterday I had just enough room to put my feet down on warm carpet. I kicked the magazines away; I picked them up to throw them out. It doesn't happen. Instead I read the titles; I recognized some of the authors and put the magazines down gently in a stack on top of the night stand. I'll get to those sometime soon.

I have a path that goes through the house, to all my small areas. The books have encroached upon them slowly, like slow growing cacti the stacks moved in closer on either side and got taller as well. Touching them was a risk, not because of needles, but because of their precarious engineering. I tried for years to stack the books in the safest way possible, but every effort was met with resistance. Now the books are stacked on either side of my path in illogical order. Despite my feet meeting paper this morning I can still see my path to the bathroom.

In the bathroom I do my daily ritual and now I am sitting on the toilet. I have managed to keep the bathroom clean, there are plastic crates full of magazines, but they are carefully placed and elevated off the floor with scraps of wood. I have room to move here, and the books haven't moved any closer since the available space was filled. I think they are afraid of the possibility of a leak or overflowing toilet. Sometimes the only time I can ease my anxiety is to sit in a hot bath. The books are afraid of water, but I can't close the bathroom door, and sometimes even in the bath I feel them threatening me. My next path should take me from the bathroom, across the hall into the spare room. That is where I'll get dressed.

The pathway to my dressing area is unobstructed from yesterday, but the space inside the room is different. There have always been stacks of food related books in this room. Cookbooks, food science books and culinary arts textbooks have been building in this room. At one point there was a desk and cabinets where I kept art supplies and worked on crafts. All of these things have been consumed. Now I only have a few plastic containers of clothes just inside the door, and the three by three foot space in which to put them on. As I got dressed I noticed the stacks seemed to be not just jutting into the air, but curving toward me. Such severe leaning should have caused the books to collapse into piles of rubble. As I was dressing, I felt as if I was just standing in the palm of a hardcover and paper hand, its fingers curved toward me, as if waiting to crush me at a moment's notice. I hesitated to put my shirt on. The thought of losing sight of the long fingers made of millions of potential paper-cuts was too much. Finally I took a deep breath and put the faded black t-shirt on. Once my head popped through the opening and I looked about me, the fingers were closer, nearly touching my head. Loose pieces of paper hidden inside the highest books came free and rained down on my head. I ran, as much as anyone in such small spaces could.