“Bertha’s Books”

By Christine Stoddard

The electric doors squeaked open as slowly as the disoriented drivers moved their cars in
the parking lot. A draft whistled through the lobby, but, when the doors parted, winter
winds overwhelmed the weak indoor breeze. It was cold outside, with bites of sleet
sailing through the air. Not a single green plant prevailed. Tan and faded chocolate
dappled the dreary landscape. Even the more modern townhouses and offices in the
neighborhood seemed to sag. Nothing escaped the wintry bleakness. Yet Bertha had
another reason for seeking shelter in the library.
As the large woman rolled her suitcase into the building, more than one person pretended
not to stare at her. Bertha said nothing and only ran a fleshy hand through her off-white
hair as she looked around the lobby. No matter what, Bertha’s chipped nails were all
different lengths. They often snagged the coarse mane that coiled into woolly bunches
and framed the strangely small face. Piggishly upturned, the nose almost touched the
perpetually pursed lips. The dark eyes nearly bumped into each other. Everything
appeared too close, crowded. Only the cheeks were ample. They hung loosely in flabs
that formed the doughy body. The complexion was as hazy as the fog hovering outside.
Those details, however, only revealed themselves to keen spectators. To everyone else,
Bertha mostly seemed big. Her clothes were too bulky for casual observers to make out
the Rubenesque curves of her figure. Her trademark rose-colored ski jacket puffed out to
disguise her true weight; her navy blue sweatpants billowed with her every step. The
woman’s clunky shoes, those scuffed-up messes of cheap leather from Salvation Army,
made even her naturally tiny feet seem gargantuan.
The woman sat down on the nearest couch and began chewing something just barely
hanging out of her lips very loudly. That something was invisible to everyone else, but
she gnawed at it with a rodent’s fervency. Bertha reached for a book, noisily flipped the
pages, and snorted as she read, with the rhythm of a repulsive machine. Flip. Snort.
Snort. Sniff. Flip. Sniff. The mechanical rat stank so pungently of alcohol and marijuana
that parents pushed their small children behind them as they passed the massive woman
in her massive jacket. But the stiffness of the parents’ legs could not protect their little
boys and girls from Bertha. Odor transcends all.
“Mommy, Mommy—”
“What?”
“That lady smells.”
“Shh!”
“Could we go check out a puzzle book, Mommy?”
“Yes!”
“That lady still smells.”
“The puzzle books are on the second floor, remember? Let’s go find the moose one.”
Eventually, Bertha had perused the short stories of William Faulkner and witnessed the
repines of Soccer Moms long enough. She grew restless in the lobby. The woman set
down the book, stood up, breathed in deeply, and stretched out her short arms. Her jacket
made crinkling sounds as she moved. The possibility that someone might be studying
near her never occurred to Bertha. Survival demanded that she placed herself first always.
She left her suitcase leaning against the sofa, convinced no one would want the battered
luggage. It smelled just like her.
Bertha lumbered over to the restroom. It was a typical migration of hers. The floor
trembled beneath Bertha’s clapping shoes before she finally pushed the door open,
undeterred by the fact that wet toilet paper covered the tiles. She trudged through the
slush and locked herself up in one of her favorite hiding places.
Normally, Bertha took twice as long to use the restroom as anyone else. Oftentimes she
carried in a magazine to keep her company. When didn’t, she perused the graffiti on the
walls like a connoisseur of vandalism. Bertha particularly liked a series of unsigned
dinosaur drawings. They all seemed so happy as they roamed around penciled-in ferns or
dunked their heads into swirly, graphite ponds. Bertha tried not to think about their
extinction but her mind always inevitably wandered back to the sad reality. She loved the
memory of something that no longer existed. More than anything, this nostalgia chained
her to the bathroom for far too long. Sometimes it was too loud to think in the rest of the
library, what with people chattering on their cell phones or groaning at their laptops—
doing anything to avoid the books.
On one particularly rare occasion, Bertha did not emerge from the restroom for almost an
hour. She locked herself in the largest pistachio green stall and stared at a stream of
raptors. They chased something that resembled a prehistoric teddy bear. Then Bertha lit
up. The raptors began to run around. A few even hopped over to the next stall and
splashed around the toilet water. The prehistoric teddy bear scurried behind a fern. Bertha
let out a raspy laugh.
“You little guys are trying to find the books, huh? Eat some of their pages out? Make a
meal out of words?”
Bertha took another hit, still fixated upon the raptors. They were her cinema.
Just outside of the restroom door, a librarian quibbled with a volunteer about the Dewey
Decimal system.
“I hope you know those belong in the 800s,” the librarian scoffed. The volunteer, a
scrawny, freckled thing, balanced far too many books in her arms.
“They don’t have labels, Ma’am.”
“Of course not. They’re new.”
“Ma’am, are you sure these don’t belong in the 750s?”
“Don’t be a fool.”
The librarian left the volunteer standing there and walked into the restroom. She
inspected the tightness of her hair bun in the mirror. Never, ever did she allow a single
strand to wiggle out from the clutches of her golden bobby pins. Satisfied with her
reflection, the librarian paused when the scent of marijuana hit her. She tensed up when
she suddenly recognized it. Then she spotted a huge mound of marijuana butts on the
floor of Bertha’s stall and ran over to the front desk, her pencil skirt nearly ripping in the
process.
“There’s a pile of…Cannabis sativa…in the ladies’ room,” the librarian whispered to the
butch security guard. “Right on the floor. I heard a woman giggle so she must still be in
there.”
“How high was the mound?” the security guard asked, dramatically raising her brow to
demonstrate her incredulity. She removed her outstretched legs from the cluttered desk
before her as the librarian anxiously twisted her necklace.
“Easily a foot high.”
“What? How’s that possible? Is this some kind of magic realism crap?”
The librarian looked slightly startled by the guard’s literary reference. “Well,” she said
rather slowly, “no, I don’t think so. I mean, I saw it. Really, I’m not the one who’s high
here.”
The guard cupped her face in her hands. “You know, they told me working here would be
easy.” The words came out in one exasperated breath.
“I’m sorry. Could you just—”
“Of course.” The security guard threw down her magazine, slid her thumbs through her
belt loops, and hiked up her baggy pants. “It’s my job.”
The guard marched straight to the restroom and sighed before swinging open the door.
The room reeked of pot. The first thing the guard spotted was a little girl standing on her
tiptoes, washing her dimpled hands at the white sink.
“Hi,” the girl mouthed with a child’s shy innocence.
“Hi,” the guard gruffly replied. She took a few steps forward and bent down to examine
the floor of each stall.
But all of the stalls were empty. Bertha had gone and left only gritty bits of her pastime
behind. Somehow, she always managed to disappear at the most convenient moments
even when she wasn’t aware that trouble lurked nearby. In that respect, at least, Bertha
was lucky.
The little girl was pressing the lever of the paper towel dispenser when the guard asked,
“Did somebody just leave, kid?”
The girl did not answer. Instead, she tore off a piece of paper and meticulously dried her
hands.
“Hey, you, kid—I asked, did somebody leave?”
“Mommy says I’m, uh, not a rewiable source ‘cause I got a big imagination.”
The guard sighed again and muttered a curse or two under her breath. Then she turned to
the girl, “Okay, whatever. Don’t smoke pot when you’re older, okay? It’s expensive and
bad for you and…all that.”
The child’s eyes widened. She nodded, looking to fulfill an expectation rather than
responding to something she really understood. Then she tossed her paper towel in the
trash and scurried back to her fairy tales.
The guard returned to her desk and pretended to forget about the incident. She went back
to reading her car magazine. The librarian, meanwhile, had stalked the volunteer and
lectured her about misshelving the new books. Bertha was outside, chasing the raptors
through the nascent snow. It was a normal day at the library.
This time, however, Bertha slipped in and out of the restroom much faster than usual. Her
bladder had a need and she fulfilled that need. As soon as she zipped up her fly, Bertha
clumped out, not bothering to wash her hands. Dirt suited her. The woman cleared her
throat and scratched herself. The library was not as busy as usual, she noted, still scraping
her dry scalp. To add to her long list of unpleasantries, Bertha constantly itched.
Nothing about Bertha connoted elegance, but she was forgiven. After all, she lived in the
library.
Now, some people use the phrase “live in the library” idiomatically when describing a
pathological bookworm, a heavy-duty nerd, or an obsessive-compulsive honors student.
Bertha, however, was a hobo who literally lived in the library. It was her home, a refuge
much more acceptable to her than any homeless shelter with flickering lights and grimy
bathrooms.
“Don’t ever go to one of those places,” another hobo once warned Bertha as they waited
to receive soup from the blue-haired church ladies bustling around an RV. The church
visited the park every Wednesday evening to feed “mouths and souls,” as they put it.
Normally they only succeeded in the former and gave their lambs diarrhea.
The hobo talking to Bertha was short yet lanky. He barely made it to Bertha’s shoulder.
“My girlfriend unwillingly lost her virginity at a shelter, if you know what I mean,” the
hobo told Bertha.
Bertha nodded, “Yeah, I’ve heard the stories about brawls and rapes and killings. Theft,
too, of course. Especially that shelter up in Northside.”
“You seen the one in Southside?”
Bertha shook her head. “Uh-huh. I never go to any of them. Like I said, I’ve heard the
stories.”
“Where you live then?”
Bertha’s cramped face flashed suspiciously, from the mean eyes to the downturned lips.
Even though it meant not eating until she found another church group serving dinner, she
stepped out of the soup line to end the conversation. As a dual hobo and junkie, Bertha
did not trust anyone. Only books deserved her full confidence.
“Hey, where are you going?” the hobo called, obviously offended. The hurt crouched in
his baby blue eyes. Even another beggar had shunned him.
Bertha did not answer. Instead, she began heading to the one place she felt truly safe: the
library.
Of course, Bertha did not spend all of her time in the library. Even the laziest of security
guards surely would have noticed a giant, frazzled woman wandering around the shelves
for hours every single day. Bertha usually bumbled outside for a long smoke, tripped
around the park a few times, and begged outside the nearest shopping center. Her trick
was to come in at a different time every night. But the fact was that she retired to the
library every evening to sleep in the archives.
Her reasoning for sleeping in the archives was simple and effective. No one cared about
old books anymore. They only want to see pretty, new things, she thought, so nobody
would notice if I pitched a bed back in that row of tall filing cabinets and floor-to-ceiling
shelves. Bertha threw out a blanket on the floor and layered a couple of oversized
sweaters on top of herself. Then she rolled up her rose-colored coat for a pillow.
She was right. Not one person ever disturbed her, stumbling over her as they searched for
some rare book or document. The archives always remained silent. Bertha slept more
peacefully there than she recalled ever sleeping anywhere for as long as she lived.
Bertha revisited her sofa after her unusually fast trip to the restroom. She was happy that
she did not have to cross anyone else’s path; usually, she ended up playing a courtesy
tango in the narrow corridor leading to the restroom. Bertha would try to exit the corridor
at the same time that another woman tried to enter. As big as Bertha was and as small as
the corridor was, it was impossible for both she and another adult woman to squeeze
through at the same time. This fact always irritated Bertha, but, because it had not
happened that day, Bertha had no need to feel annoyed. She almost sat down at her sofa
when a tattered book hanging off the edge of one of the cushions caught her attention.
Someone must have thrown it there while she was in the restroom. The book laid face
down, so Bertha flipped it over.
“The Diamond Sutra,” she mouthed as she read the title. She turned to the Introduction.
“’This is a codex reproduction of the Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist text that the Chinese
printed on a scroll in 868 A.D. It represents the first printed book in the history of man.’
Huh. Who knew? So much for Gutenberg.”
Bertha snuggled into the sofa and drew the book onto her lap, where she examined the
woodblock prints and characters she could not decipher. Everything appeared so ancient
and mysterious, from the uniform and monotonous writing to the thin, subtle lines in the
illustrations. In all her reading, Bertha had never encountered anything like it before.
“I want to keep this,” she said to herself.
Bertha looked around and saw nobody’s eyes were on her. Then she flung out her pointer
finger like a pocketknife and began scratching off the barcode sticker from the back of
the book. That way the book wouldn’t set off any alarms when it left the library in
Bertha’s suitcase. Nobody would ever know she had stolen it.
Once Bertha had completely removed the sticker, she rolled it up and threw it under the
sofa to hide the evidence. After all, who would think to look under there? And even if
someone did, it was unlikely that the person would scan the code to discover which book
had been stolen and even more unlikely that anyone would trace the theft back to Bertha.
She grinned and licked the adhesive off of her fingers. Surprisingly, Bertha loathed
stickiness. She would tolerate twigs and lint in her hair or soil on her skin, but nothing
gluey.
“Nasty stuff,” Bertha muttered. When she realized that her saliva couldn’t get it off,
Bertha ambled back to the restroom. She knew the soap there to be among the finest she
had ever used, not that she was one to comment upon finery. Bertha had accustomed
herself to taking sponge baths in the handicap stall.
Bertha washed her hands and studied the Diamond Sutra for the rest of the evening.
When she heard the security guard patrolling the floor and informing patrons that the
library would close in the next half-hour, Bertha gathered her belongings. Then she
tucked herself into the back of the archives, where no one but the books would talk to her.
Bertha dreamt of dinosaurs that night. The dream featured a wrinkly blue one with thick,
rough scales. The dinosaur, strangely, wore eyeglasses and a fitted sweater. The sweater
seemed so soft and dainty compared to the creature that brandished it, like something
better suited for a fairy doll. Even odder was that this dinosaur could read, or at least that
appeared to be the case. In his heap of blueness, he handled a tiny book beneath a
sprawling sycamore. Bertha’s line of sight suddenly leapt to the book’s papyrus pages but
the pages bore nothing. They were thick and ridged from the plants that formed them.
Even still, the blue dinosaur turned the page, as if engaged in some fascinating story. A
minute later, he turned the next one. And the next. And the next one after that.
When the dinosaur reached the final page of the story, a flock of orange, chicken-sized
dinosaurs descended upon him. They clawed at every part of his body, from his snout to
his tail. His blood spurted everywhere, even marking the sycamore’s bleached trunk. The
blue dinosaur screamed again and again before toppling over. A low, rumbling bellow
struck the air as his head slammed against the ground. The orange dinosaurs feasted on
the fallen carcass. His stringy veins flew into the heavens. One of the orange dinosaurs
swallowed the blue dinosaur’s book whole, snapping his beak like a pelican until it slid
down his throat. The other dinosaurs had already eaten the blue dinosaur’s eyeglasses and
sweater.
Bertha bolted up and looked around the archives. Her galloping heart made the only
sound in the room. There were no dinosaurs in sight. Even in her frenzied state, Bertha
knew dinosaurs only lived in books or as graffiti on bathroom stalls. She released the
breath she did not realize she had been holding. Then she took out the Diamond Sutra
from her suitcase, petted it, and brought it to her chest. Bertha fell asleep hugging the
book.
The next morning, Bertha woke up, smacking her lips. Her small face shone red and
sweaty. She rubbed her eyes, making the skin around them even grayer. The clock read
8:30 a.m. The library wouldn’t open for another half hour, but the floor had already
started to buzz. A squirrelly girl hopped around, turning on all of the computers and
checking the printers. Several other high school students—disgruntled “volunteers”
attempting to fulfill community service requirements—pushed around re-shelving carts.
Most of the carts were pretty empty, considering how few people picked up books
anymore. Bertha would have to wait until the library officially opened before she
hobnobbed from bookcase to bookcase, otherwise people would wonder why she was in
there.
For the next thirty minutes, Bertha lied on her back, blowing out spit bubbles. They
popped and splattered on her chin. Each time they popped, she would wipe them away
and start blowing again.
When all the library lights flicked on, Bertha knew she could fearlessly show her face.
She wove in and out of the volunteers, walked down the elegant staircase, and out to her
regular bench. Bertha leaned her suitcase against the bench and fumbled with her lighter.
She never could start her day off without smoking. It had been a ritual since she was
fourteen.
Bertha gazed out at the plot of land surrounding the library, the nearly vacant parking lot,
and the adjacent park. Years and years ago, Bertha mused, she had seen that parking lot
full. Years and years ago, she had seen scores of children teasing each other on the
playground. Those years felt as full and as long ago as centuries. Bertha no longer
expected to see more than a handful of patrons at the library or families in the park.
People preferred the comfort of sterility in their own homes.
As Bertha puffed, an elderly woman with short hair and who seemed to be her teenage
granddaughter approached her general direction. Both donned sleek jogging outfits. The
suits looked more expensive than anything Bertha had ever owned in all her life. The
older woman wore quiet pastels and the young one fluorescent pinks and purples. Such a
jarring contrast disturbed Bertha. She took an extra long drag.
“You wanna go to the library to work on your research paper?” the elderly woman asked,
swinging her arms back and forth in tune with her legs. She was listening to disco music
so loud it seemed like she wanted everyone else in the area to hear it, too.
The girl shrugged her shoulders and replied, “Why go to the library when I have the
Internet?”
The conversation ended there. Grandmother and granddaughter continued following the
winding sidewalk past the library.
“The Internet,” Bertha hissed. She tossed her cigarette to the ground and stomped on it.
When she saw that the embers still glowed, Bertha stomped again and twisted her foot
back and forth. The glow died. Bertha wanted to smile but something inside of her
brewed too bitter to allow for that.
As the years passed and Bertha grew older, she spent more and more time in the library
during the day. Her tired legs refused to walk as much as they used to so Bertha spent
more of her waking hours in the periodicals, reading esoteric academic journals. Topics
ranged anywhere from Vietnamese Feminist Studies to the Environmental Science of
Antarctica. She liked the feel of the journals’ thick pages between her fingers, so it would
infuriate her anytime a university press transitioned its journal to a CD-ROM.
Bertha would spend hours by herself, talking to the still library air.
“What would Foucault say?” Bertha mumbled as she furrowed her brow. “Author, not
author function…”
The people who passed her were generally librarians or volunteers. The librarians hung
around because it was their job and they had to pretend it mattered to them; the
volunteers wanted their “Good Samaritan” awards or their National Honors Society
credit. Few people actually sat down to enjoy the weight of a book in their hands. Even
the librarians, men and women who had supposedly dedicated their lives to books, spent
their time at the computer more often than not. In the rare event that someone not
working for the library entered Bertha’s vicinity, the person quickly fled. No one wanted
to hear her, smell her, look at her. Not that her absence would have encouraged many
patrons to stay for long periods, anyway. Most people only cared to zip in and out for an
audio book. Bertha’s presence just hastened their already abbreviated library visits.
Every now and then, when Bertha grew tired of examining verbose literary theory or
scientific articles, she pulled out the Diamond Sutra. She tried to imagine the original
book printed on a long, flowing scroll. Then she imagined a ring of Buddhist monks
chanting the words on the pages. They all wore burnt orange robes. More than once,
Bertha closed her eyes and chanted what she guessed the pages said—“Life is suffering”
or “Love, it is often said, has nothing to do with reason”—but only disappointed herself
each time. The book was inaccessible to her.
“Damn Chinese characters.”
The episode always ended with her slamming the book shut and shoving it into her
weathered suitcase. Bertha would either grab another journal or, if enough energy pulsed
through her, she would go out for a walk. The only other options were drinking, smoking,
begging, or standing in line for food. After carrying out this routine for years, Bertha
knew no other lifestyle.
One day Bertha walked to the library, lugging her suitcase behind her as always. She had
just finished slurping down a spaghetti dinner at the local Catholic church. Red splotches
covered her signature jacket as if someone had attempted to kill her. But Bertha no longer
cared how she looked in public. After all, she was always in public. Privacy and
homelessness do not co-exist.
Bertha pressed the handicap button of the library’s front entrance and waited. The door
did not open. Bertha bit her lower lip. She pressed the button again and tapped her foot.
Just as she was poised to press the button again, Bertha saw a small sheet of paper taped
to the building’s entrance. In all capital letters, crudely scrawled, the sign read CLOSED.
Bertha waddled up to the door, pressed her face to the glass, steamed it up with her vodka
breath, and peered inside. All was dark and the bookshelves stood empty. Not a single
person wandered around, not even a rude teenage volunteer.
Bertha began rapping on the door.
“Come on! Open up! It’s not Christmas!”
When no one responded, she knocked harder and harder until it stung her knuckles. Ten
minutes passed before Bertha accepted that nobody was coming to open the door any
time soon. Defeated, Bertha drifted over to the park and lied down on a rickety wood
bench. Had she been bareback or wearing a thin shirt, splinters surely would have
attacked her. Of course, her rose-colored jacket protected her.
“Damn county government,” the hobo groused and withdrew a lighter from the depths of
her pocket. She attempted to burn through another cigarette but ended up burning the tip
of her finger instead. “Stupid—!” It stung more than the glass against her knuckles.
Bertha waved her hand around and blew on the scalded skin. When that didn’t work, she
shoved her finger in her mouth.
The clouds shifted as Bertha nursed her burnt flesh. It had been a while since she
observed the clouds outside of books. As her skin wrinkled from the saliva bath, the sky
transitioned from gray to a more menacing black. Wind shot past her, gust after gust.
Finally one of the gusts did something besides muss up Bertha’s already tangled hair. It
delivered a thin newspaper right to her wiggling chin.
“Ugh,” Bertha muttered, “What’s this?” She pulled it off of her face and looked at it.
“Oh. The county rag. Might as well read it since the dumb library’s closed.”
She opened to the first page and continued flipping until something interested her. That
did not include the school district’s standardized test scores or a new history teacher at
the central high school. The horoscopes, at least, proved mildly amusing. Bertha almost
crumpled up the newspaper and tossed it back to the wind when a tiny text box caught
her attention. She gaped. The headline read: FREDERICK B. JAMES LIBRARY
PERMANENTLY CLOSES. A couple of lines describing the library’s lack of funding
and general public interest ensued. The story was so short and so tiny that Bertha barely
believed she had seen it.
“Gone just like that?” Bertha asked. She gulped and stuffed the newspaper into her
suitcase. “Where will I live now?” Without even thinking, Bertha took the Diamond
Sutra out of her suitcase and started stroking it. “What will happen to me? Where will I
go?”
Bertha never knew how long she had lived at Frederick B. James because she measured
her life by books, not days. Since everyday was the same, ten or twenty years could have
easily passed without her notice. She was gray when she first went there and gray now.
The hobo pushed herself off the bench and started her trek to a large pine tree she knew
grew at the edge of the park. She walked into the wind and burgeoning rain as if cold and
wetness did not exist. Drops of water began to fall from the sky in nasty globs, but, again,
Bertha’s rose-colored jacket protected her. Her face got a little damp but she was mostly
fine. Only her suitcase suffered as she wheeled it through the growing mud. It got dirtier
and dirtier.
When Bertha reached the tree, she stomped right through the lower branches and huddled
against the base of the trunk. The rain had gotten heavier and more aggressive within the
last few minutes. Bertha’s jacket could no longer shield her. Had the rain been lighter, the
pine’s umbrella form might have protected her, but the sky wept uncontrollably. And yet
Bertha preferred to get soaked rather than seek refuge at the homeless shelter.
“I’ll go the branch library tomorrow,” Bertha muttered. She flicked her lighter but her
cigarette was too damp to catch flame.
Bertha spent the rest of the night gazing out into the park, her mind fixated on the books
she had only ever found at Frederick B. James.
As she had vowed, Bertha journeyed to G. Hardy Branch Library the next morning.
She immediately parked herself in the back of the building and plucked anything off the
shelves near her. Bertha discovered a journal with academic articles on the history, form,
and theory of the book, from scrolls to codices to e-books. Later on, she devoured a
handbook for journalism majors and another on writing for the web. Bertha also found
books about typeface, flash poetry, and the top university literature programs in the
country.
Time passed, less so for Bertha than other people. One day, she meandered to the front
desk of G. Hardy, where a sweet-faced librarian typed away at her computer. The
librarian sported a tame cardigan with embroidered roses and a single strand of pearls on
her bony wrist. The librarian smelled Bertha and looked up.
“Uh, hi,” Bertha slurred.
The librarian shifted in her seat and fooled around with one of the buttons on her
cardigan. “Hello. How may I help you?”
“I, um…do you have the latest issue of The New York Times?”
The librarian stared at the hobo. “The New York Times has been out of print for the past
seven years, Ma’am.”
“Huh. What about The Washington Post?”
“Out of print for the past ten. But they have an excellent website.”
“No, no, I need a hard copy. My eyes don’t like screens. They—”
“I’m sorry to hear that, but the only newspapers left are local ones.”
“Where can I find a hard copy of The L.A. Times or The Boston Globe?”
“Perhaps I misspoke, Ma’am. No national newspapers exist in hard copy anymore. They
have all been out of print for years now. If you want to see the county newspaper,
however—“
“Uh, no. No thanks. I just..didn’t know.”
The librarian smiled politely and returned to her computer screen. Her acrylic nails
clicked loudly on the keyboard.
Bertha gritted her teeth and shuffled to her sofa. As she sat down, her knees creaked. The
sofa made the same sad sound as it sagged beneath her weight.
When she went out that evening, Bertha buried the Diamond Sutra under the same
umbrella-like pine tree. She marked the spot with a stick she stuck into the ground. In a
past era, a curious child may have yanked the stick from the soil, but Bertha did not
worry about today’s children being so inquisitive. Her book was secure.
Eventually, the G. Hardy Branch Library closed, too, but with even less fanfare than the
county’s central library. Bertha saw no mention in the newspaper, only the same
CLOSED sign she met at Frederick B. James. Apple Lewis and Clemmons Branches
closed, as well, but Bertha never even encountered closed signs at either of the buildings.
The doors were simply locked, the lights out, and the book shelves empty.
Bertha burrowed her unfriendly eyes into the cracked bricks of Clemmons Branch
Library the day she discovered it too had closed. She had never realized how dilapidated
it appeared before then. Ivy and moss shrouded the exterior. The doors bore chipped paint
and cloudy windows wore shredded curtains. It was a phantom of a building.
The hobo spat on the ground as tears began to well up in her eyes. Then she swallowed
and lit a cigarette. The smoke blew in her face and made her cry even more. All the
libraries she had ever known were gone.
“My body is my home,” Bertha whispered as she breathed out curlicues of smoke.
Then she wheeled away her suitcase, disappearing into the ruckus of the city. Somehow,
even that big, rose-colored jacket faded from view as Bertha left the ghosts of her books
behind.