The Seventeenth Shelf

Written for Sadje’s What Do You See
and for Muse on Monday where David
asks us to write about a hunt or a search.
Here’s where the prompts took me.

She had been told the book would find her, not the other way around. Her grandmother had said it with such certainty, pressing a dry hand against her cheek: You’ll know it by the weight of it. Not heavy. The other kind.

That had been twelve years ago. Tonight, Maren finally understood what she meant.

The library had been locked since the estate sale. She’d talked her way past a drowsy archivist to a door with a latch that gave too easily, as if it had been expecting someone. Inside, the air held a musty coldness …. the smell of old paper and wax and some faint trace of smoke from centuries of candles.

She moved along the lower shelves first, pulling spines toward her by habit, reading the faded gilt lettering with a finger more than an eye. Latin titles, French. A handful of English pamphlets stitched together with black thread. Nothing called to her.

The window shade glowed. Outside it was fully dark, but the linen held the feeling of afternoon, luminous and still. She stood beneath the arch of gold scrollwork and looked up. Ten shelves. Twelve. The topmost books were just shapes from here, dark rectangles breathing quietly in the half-light.

She drifted toward the rolling ladder. The brass rail was cold; the wood creaked in a low, observant way, as if the library were clearing its throat.

Seventeenth shelf.

Her hand stopped abruptly.

The book was narrow, bound in something paler than the others …. not white, but the color of old letters kept in a drawer. No title on the spine. She pulled it free and felt it: not heavy. The other kind. A lightness so particular it was almost like holding breath.

She stood there on the ladder for a long time with the library dark around her and the window glowing softly below, and she didn’t open it yet. She only held it.

She remembered something else her grandmother told her: Don’t rush the beginning, Maren. You only get one.

This is “Searchlight” by Shinedown