Amber Sparks - The Unfinished World - And Other Stories

Roland, shot for mutiny. By then glad to know how he was going to die, and that it would be clean, and painless, and quick.

Jürgen, fallen from the sky like Icarus. Not in a firefight; his plane developed engine trouble and he went down in front of a clear, bright blue sky and a burning sun.

In the end, nothing left but the trees; twisted things whittled by shrapnel and fire to pointed black stakes. They hold up the sky and fence in the killing fields, make a hideous trinket of barbed wire and wood.

In the end, take the photos of past school classes and strike them through: an X , an X , an X , an X .

In the end, the battle-scarred world stands still.

Fresh

Something is wrong. Your heart, it seems, has become a fish. It leaps, flutters, flops sideways a few times, then stops. You fall down.

Just an hour ago your muscles were loose and limber and you walked down the street to the neighbor’s, stood on his stoop and talked about your grandkids, spring training, gas prices. Now your thighs and calves are tightening, rigid, blood pooling under the skin. Your brain cells are losing their structural integrity. Putrefaction has started, and the carbohydrates and lipids have begun to form gases in your intestinal tract. An army of blowflies is already on the way.

Bloat

Your daughter stands nervously behind the cops as they force open your door. This is harder than it looks with you sprawled in the doorway, heavy with decay. The smell bursts from the front hallway and everyone gasps, even your daughter. After only five days it seems impossible she wouldn’t recognize you, but you are not you. You have transmogrified; you are a monster, a shiny human skin sack stuffed with liquefying tissue, leaking from every orifice.

The smell of it all is unbearable and one of the cops mutters something about masks. Your daughter, made brave by grief, puts her T-shirt over her mouth and tries to get closer. It is then that your skin begins to ripple and marble. She runs from the house, and it isn’t the first time. You have been a grotesque to her while living, even as you were to her mother before her. Your current state of gracelessness reminds us now that you have not always lived with grace. Though in the last few years you have tried to atone, there is a reason you have lived alone often. There is a reason several wives have wished you would die — and finally you have.

Delayed Decay

You wanted to be cremated; you told your daughter and your son and your sisters and your wretched almost-ex-wife. But somehow, no one has listened. They just want to throw you in a box and bury you as quickly as they can.

Your almost-ex-wife says a few words that aren’t true, and your daughter tries but just keeps crying, something her grown children have never seen her do. Their uncle cries, but that’s nothing new. He always was a pussy, your son. Your grandkids, though — two boys, good kids — they play baseball for their college teams and they date pretty girls. You think one of them might be a Mormon. You disapprove of God, but you had still hoped to become a better man for their sake. You hoped to show them how to stay men, unlike their uncle. You would be sad to see how little they seem to mind your passing. They look dismayed but mostly distracted, hot and itchy in black wool on a warm spring day. Get it over with, they seem to be saying, and you would probably agree. You were never one for ceremony. Get it over with, and here comes the lid and the shovel and the earthy hole. Here come the worms.

Dry Remains

Eventually decomposition strips you bare, even in that solid oak you’ve taken the shape of. You’ve helped, finally, to enrich something around you, by feeding the soil with your skin and fat and muscle. Now the soil is full of phosphorus, potassium, calcium, and especially nitrogen. Now the soil is supremely satisfied, and you’d be okay with that. You always did like growing things. You always were better with plants than with people.

Some days are harder than others for the fever librarian. Some days, the sadness freezes in her veins, and on these still days she is able to file and sort, to restock and research and perform her duties as she always has. But some days, the ice breaks up and the memory ships can navigate through, laden with their dangerous cargo: lust, anger, obsession. On these days her fingers itch to release all the fevers, to bring back all of man’s carnal passions and searing pains. To spread illness and abandon throughout the known world.

The fever librarian is keeping it quiet, but an epidemic has begun to infect her heart; it is spreading through her brain and body like wildfire. Her irises are blackening, her hair is darkening to copper, her skin is just starting to betray the red of the fevers burning inside of her.

From the Eternal Library’s Official Employee Handbook : The brain of the Fever Librarian should be made mostly of melancholy. The Fever Librarian should wear black bile in the veins. The Fever Librarian should be an unmarried woman with a soft, drowned heart, and a choleric disposition. She should be pale and thin, with a look that hints at Perpetual Anguish of the Soul. She should resemble someone’s grandmother, someone we have known for ages in the abstract. Dependable. Invisible .

From the Eternal Library’s Official Employee Handbook: One would do better to forget the Fever Librarian’s name as soon as one has learned it. She would do better to forget her own.

The opposite of melancholy is fierce, bright delirium. It has a name: fever, also known as pyrexia, comes from the Greek pyr , meaning fire .

The fever librarian has read all the scholarship, has attended the debates and listened to the shouted discussion on the radio programs. Some scholars are furious at the fevers being catalogued and contained. These scholars say the fevers are a good, or at least a necessary evil, humanity’s way of fighting illness and tedium. We once prayed they did not last long, and endured the irrationality they engendered, and we breathed a long slow breath of relief when they had gone. And now humanity, these scholars claim, is scarcely human at all. We move like molasses, they say, in this mire of supreme rationality. We are barely beings, so calculating and calm are we.

The scholars on the other side argue, of course, that man lives in a golden age of enlightenment. Now, they say, we have the mental reserves and energy to study and dream up great improvements for the human race. Now, they say, we have rid the body of wasteful passions and useless energies expended, hours stolen from every day to relieve our unspeakable animal urges. We are more human than ever, these scholars say; we have finally risen above our shameful pasts, more than angels, we, with each new experiment.

The fever librarian comes from a time of incredible yearning. Plucked from the past, deprived of memory, she still retains certain physical imprints of that time. Her body remembers dancing, and driving, and craning the neck to take in great tall buildings going up at greater speeds. Her body remembers fear, too, and pain, and the way her limbs had of leaving her control for the refuge of a neck or a chest or another pair of lips — unthinkable, the idea of violating the space of another human body, but as her veins thaw and her skin warms, these memories begin to surface as she moves, as she walks and rises and sits and stands and even as she breathes.