Before she can return home for the day , Ella must return her book to the library and pick out a new one. It is a weekly requirement for this semester's Literature Class, a book a week, reports due no later than 16:00 on Fridays. She is tired and just wants to go home, curl up in her bed and put on some mindless show and forget that today ever was. It has not been a good day. Too many hours spent with classmates she did not like, preparing their final presentation on recent advancements to the Heim theory. A terrible test return of 57% percent in her algorithms class. The people she worked for giving her notice, they would be moving at the end of the month, at the end of her shift. Nevermind waking up from that whole weekend spent with Matt. Again.
The library, for the most part, is still the domain of the university student, though it reamins open for those who like to read real books, newspapers and magazines from past times. As she waits her clearance to enter the building, she fiddles with the heart-shaped locket that has always been with her, slung gold around her neck. She can, for instance, remember sucking out some of the metallic taste from it her first day of Kindergarten and her teacher, Ms. Rosa, telling her she would get sick. But she had known this was not true. Sucking on the locket, feeling the cold on her tongue, the roof of her mouth, was one of her favourite things to do and she could not remember being sick, except that one time she had an ear ache and it wasn't from something stupid, like trying to stick the locket in her ear. Her mother had said, The wind. She remembers that, an echo of a voice. She is no longer sure where the necklace came from, if she ever really knew. There is no one let to tell her. Pure luck that she is alive, while the rest of them were dead. Dead so long now, she could not be sure if her memories of them could be considered accurate. All the faces, of her parents, siblings and extended family merged into nothingness. A general vagueness, a loss of meaning.
Set in the face of the locket is a rose made of black jade and on the back, etched in cursive writing, the words: Nur Du. The locket can be opened and inside there is only one portrait, although she assumes there must have been two at one point. The picture that remains is of a woman, in sepia tones, who has the same eyebrows and eyes as Ella. The woman's lips are a touch smaller and her nose slightly narrower, but if Ella were to lose a few pounds, the two women would look quite similar. The likelihood, Ella knew, of her losing weight was small with her three whipped topping, flavoured coffees a day and when, more often than not, like today, she would stop at McSanto's to grab a few burgers to finish off before she arrived back home to her apartment.
When she is allowed entry into the library, the first thing she notices, as always, is the smell of contained moisture; preservation for the books. She wonders why they bother with these systems at all. No one is taking a book home to a similar climate. Very few people owned books now, unless they were insane rich and they made them themselves. It was frowned upon and hard to get permits for, and then you had to make your way to a major city, like Toronto or Calgary and use government-run facilities. It was not the writing of a book that was frowned upon, they were still published every day, just the mass reproduction of them. Several decades ago, in a time Ella can barely imagine, eco-activists fought hard to end certain industries that they deemed were unnecessary and finally won. Overnight, paper-printing went down globally, newspapers, magazines, cereal box manufacturers, the toilet paper industry (Ella has seen pictures of toilet paper. She cannot imagine how it would feel in her hand, let alone down there. She once searched her chip for paper cuts + toilet paper, but did not find any results.). Now libraries will only loan one book out at a time and only fiction stories could be obtained at the library. There were strict regulations about what could be downloaded onto the chips. The first being only truth. These laws helped to protect the Entertainment Industries, in the long run. No longer could people just visit certain websites to steal whatever they wanted. She remembers her ninth grade teacher playing an old episode of Seinfeld in the classroom about library cops and it was funny, but now there really was a need for library cops. Stealing books had become an art form, most often done in the night, tales on intrigue and suspense and speculation on the evening news, the lists of the books stolen.
Ella doesn't particularly like the library or reading, she is not there to browse. She just does today what she has always done, picks an aisle and grabs the first book that catches her eye. She laughs out loud into the quiet of the space when her eyes land on the shelf. The name! Well, this is it, isn't it then? she thinks to herself as she grabs the book, scans it over her wrist to pay the 3 dollar weekly fee. She briefly looks over the cover, the author'name first and in large silver print, an ice white sun with rainbow flares in the background, before slipping it into her bag and hurrying back out of the building, off to grab her dinner.
The library, for the most part, is still the domain of the university student, though it reamins open for those who like to read real books, newspapers and magazines from past times. As she waits her clearance to enter the building, she fiddles with the heart-shaped locket that has always been with her, slung gold around her neck. She can, for instance, remember sucking out some of the metallic taste from it her first day of Kindergarten and her teacher, Ms. Rosa, telling her she would get sick. But she had known this was not true. Sucking on the locket, feeling the cold on her tongue, the roof of her mouth, was one of her favourite things to do and she could not remember being sick, except that one time she had an ear ache and it wasn't from something stupid, like trying to stick the locket in her ear. Her mother had said, The wind. She remembers that, an echo of a voice. She is no longer sure where the necklace came from, if she ever really knew. There is no one let to tell her. Pure luck that she is alive, while the rest of them were dead. Dead so long now, she could not be sure if her memories of them could be considered accurate. All the faces, of her parents, siblings and extended family merged into nothingness. A general vagueness, a loss of meaning.
Set in the face of the locket is a rose made of black jade and on the back, etched in cursive writing, the words: Nur Du. The locket can be opened and inside there is only one portrait, although she assumes there must have been two at one point. The picture that remains is of a woman, in sepia tones, who has the same eyebrows and eyes as Ella. The woman's lips are a touch smaller and her nose slightly narrower, but if Ella were to lose a few pounds, the two women would look quite similar. The likelihood, Ella knew, of her losing weight was small with her three whipped topping, flavoured coffees a day and when, more often than not, like today, she would stop at McSanto's to grab a few burgers to finish off before she arrived back home to her apartment.
When she is allowed entry into the library, the first thing she notices, as always, is the smell of contained moisture; preservation for the books. She wonders why they bother with these systems at all. No one is taking a book home to a similar climate. Very few people owned books now, unless they were insane rich and they made them themselves. It was frowned upon and hard to get permits for, and then you had to make your way to a major city, like Toronto or Calgary and use government-run facilities. It was not the writing of a book that was frowned upon, they were still published every day, just the mass reproduction of them. Several decades ago, in a time Ella can barely imagine, eco-activists fought hard to end certain industries that they deemed were unnecessary and finally won. Overnight, paper-printing went down globally, newspapers, magazines, cereal box manufacturers, the toilet paper industry (Ella has seen pictures of toilet paper. She cannot imagine how it would feel in her hand, let alone down there. She once searched her chip for paper cuts + toilet paper, but did not find any results.). Now libraries will only loan one book out at a time and only fiction stories could be obtained at the library. There were strict regulations about what could be downloaded onto the chips. The first being only truth. These laws helped to protect the Entertainment Industries, in the long run. No longer could people just visit certain websites to steal whatever they wanted. She remembers her ninth grade teacher playing an old episode of Seinfeld in the classroom about library cops and it was funny, but now there really was a need for library cops. Stealing books had become an art form, most often done in the night, tales on intrigue and suspense and speculation on the evening news, the lists of the books stolen.
Ella doesn't particularly like the library or reading, she is not there to browse. She just does today what she has always done, picks an aisle and grabs the first book that catches her eye. She laughs out loud into the quiet of the space when her eyes land on the shelf. The name! Well, this is it, isn't it then? she thinks to herself as she grabs the book, scans it over her wrist to pay the 3 dollar weekly fee. She briefly looks over the cover, the author'name first and in large silver print, an ice white sun with rainbow flares in the background, before slipping it into her bag and hurrying back out of the building, off to grab her dinner.
Comments