IT IS CRUCIAL TO REMEMBER THAT MAGIC IS UNPREDICTABLE. Old magic, new magic, all magic. Magic has its own mysteries and rewires itself according to mood, like weather discovered between streets, rainstorms dousing only one person, or like a blizzard on the skull of a soldier, a brass band on the deck of a submarine. War magic exists, and wedding magic. Love magic and murder magic, spells for secrets kept forever, and spells for dismantling structures. Magic itself, though, sometimes ceases to exist in moments when it’s most necessary, and even when you’ve memorized the entirety of the history of spells and sacrifices, there are always ways to fail and invent, to combine traditions into something else entirely. There are ways to shift the story from one of ending, to one of beginning.
All this happened a long time ago, before the story you know. You were born in a world that wasn’t ending. This is a story about how that re-beginning came to be. It’s about the Library of the Low, about books written to be burned, and about how we brought ourselves back from the brink.
I’m old now, but old doesn’t matter. How many years have humans been looking up at the stars and thinking themselves annotated among them? How long have the stories between us been whispered and written and lost and found again?
This, then, is a story about the story: It’s about librarians. It begins on the day of my father’s death. I was ten years old. I knew the facts about blood; all ten-year-olds do. Do you? You do.
I knew this fact, for example: There was no stopping blood until it was ready. Sometimes it poured like magical porridge down the streets of a village, and other times it stood up on its own and walked out from the ground beneath an execution, a red shadow. There were spells for bringing the dead back to life, but none of them worked anymore, or at least they didn’t in the part of the country I was from.
I don’t need to tell you the long version of what happened to America. It’s no kind of jawdrop. It was a tin-can-telephone apocalypse. Men hunched in their hideys pushing buttons, curfewing the country, and misunderstanding each other, getting more and more angry and more and more panicked, until everyone who wasn’t like them got declared illegal.
When the country began to totally unravel—there are those who’d say it was always full of mothbites and founded on badly counted stitches, and I tend to agree with them—my mother was at the University on a fellowship, studying the history of rebellion. My daddy was the Head Librarian’s assistant.
The Head Librarian was called the Needle. She’d been memorizing the universe since time’s diaper days, and I never knew her real name. She was, back then, in charge of rare things from all over the world. Her collection included books like the Firfol and the Gutenbib, alongside manuscripts from authors like Octavia the Empress and Ursula Major. The collection also included an immense library of books full of the magic of both the ancient world and the new world. Everything could turn into magic if it tried. The Librarians had prepared for trouble by acquiring secrets and spells. They knew what was coming.
If you asked any of the Librarians from my town, they’d tell you their sleep went dreamless long before the country officially declared itself an oh fuck. They squirreled books and smuggled scholars, as many as they could, which wasn’t many. Some made it to Mexico. Others got to Canada. A few embarked on a ship loaded with messages in bottles.
The Needle, though, had plans for saving. She stayed, and my parents stayed with her. They spent the first years of the falling apart sitting at a desk deep beneath the University library, repeating everything the Needle told them, making memory footnotes alphabetically, in as many languages as she could teach them. She started them off small and got bigger.
“Ink,” she told my parents, “is not illegal,” and so they started making ink out of anything they could find. They made it out of burned plastic. They made it out of wasps harvested while eating the dead. They made ink in every color but red: blue and black, brown and gold. Red reminded the Needle of things she didn’t care to remember. My parents sharpened tools, started making plans, married each other in the dark of a room that had been reserved for books damaged by breathing.
The first tattoo the Needle gave was to herself.
The men in charge wanted people to forget penicillin and remember plague. They shut down the schools, starved out the teachers, and figured if they gave it a few years, everybody but them would die of measles, flu, or fear. Citizens ended up surviving on Spam and soup. No medicine. Little plots of land and falling-down houses. Basically conditions like those much of the rest of the world had faced for many years, but no one here was used to them, and so a lot of the population dropped dead due to shock, snakes, spiders, and each other. I was born four years into all of this. My mother died in childbirth, because by that time there were no doctors left in our city. The last one had been executed.
None of the magic worked that time.
The Needle delivered me, and she closed my mother’s eyes when it was time to close them.
You can call me Enry. That’s what my daddy named me. He said there was no H to be had in a world where hell had spit up this many fools and holy was this much in question.
I was not an unhappy child. The world withering above me was the only world I’d ever known, and to me it was a beautiful one.
Every few days a murmuration of soldiers came through town and said no one had any right to rights. Whenever they came, I hid myself in a knowledge shelter with the rest of the children born since the end of the world, and we waited for the soldiers to pass.
The rest of the time, we learned languages and studied history, farmed with sunlamps, and guarded the books. We were taught to read on medieval fairy tales about weather and Victorian poems about ghosts, on books of code in thirty-four languages, and magic books dating to long before Christianity. We were taught myths from Libya and poems from Andalusia and Syria, spells from Greece and gods from the land we hid beneath. We were taught about genocide but also about making the land bear fruit. We only came aboveground at night. We were not supposed to exist.
The adults, though, had to show their faces on the surface to get water rations and to be censused.
When I was ten years old, my daddy went aboveground one morning and didn’t come back by nightfall.
I found him on his back in the center of the old marble floor in the University library. Someone had decided he was smart enough to kill, or maybe he’d just walked in the path of a bullet. These were bullet years, and they flew from end to end of cities like hummingbirds had, before the hummingbirds had fled. Bullets wanted to feed. We all knew it. We’d been warned.
My daddy pointed at his chest and fumbled at his collar. I loosened his tie. I unbuttoned his buttons. I opened his shirt.
“You have to burn this,” he said. “Some books, you can only read after burning. Do you hear me? Do you understand?”
Blood was making a lake around us, and my knees were wet with it. My daddy’s breathing slowed, and his hands froze like winter had nested inside him. He was the only parent I had.
I had no spell to keep him from dying, though there should have been spells. Everyone talked about magic, but no one had all the magic they needed. That was another thing you knew if you were ten years old and living beneath a library, if the world had started ending long before you were born and now you found yourself alone in it.
There was never enough magic to save everyone. Sometimes you only had enough for yourself, or you had the wrong kind entirely. I had almost nothing in the way of spells back then. I knew how to make a dragonfly out of sonnets and a bird out of ballads. I could bring a little beam of light to life in my hand and watch it glow, but it wasn’t hot and it wasn’t a heart. I had nothing for my daddy and no way to refill him from my own soul, no way to split it, no way to share.
It is crucial to remember that life, when it is long, is full of goodbyes. I had a husband once. You are the child of one of the children of my children’s children. My husband was a man who could walk on water and whose veins ran with poems written six centuries before anyone insisted on religion. By the time I met him, I had enough magic to fill anyone with light. I could read in the dark, and the books of my family were written all over the world.
You are the amen of my family, and I am the in the beginning of yours. This story is the prayer, or one of them. This story says you can live through anything and that when it is time to go, when the entire world goes dark, then you go together, holding on to one another’s hands, and you whisper the memory of birds and bees and the names of those you loved.
When it is not time to go, though, this story says you rise.
This is what I whisper to you now, so that you will carry the story of the library, so that you will know how we made magic and how we made books out of burdens. This is to teach you how to transform loss into literature, and love into a future. It is to teach you how to make a book that will endure burning.
Hours after my father’s body went cold, the Needle found me huddled beside him.
“Will we get revenge?” I asked her. The hole in my daddy’s heart hid half a sentence, and I wanted to cut it from the skin of the person who’d killed him.
“It’s a long revenge,” she said, with some regret, and I was unsatisfied. I wanted urgency, murder, fury.
The Needle had white hair to her knees, and the ends were stone black. She carried an ax and kept it sharp, but that wasn’t what she gave me. The Needle gave me a bath and made me a sandwich, went back out in her night camouflage and hauled my daddy in.
“Before revenge,” she said, “is ceremony.”
“Do we have to go through the alphabet?” I asked, but the Needle had nothing to say to me about the letters between C and R.
The Needle kept the contents of all of her books in her head, though most of them had been burned ten months into the end. On her desk there was a heavy gold medallion she called the Old Boy, because on the back of it there were three men holding hands and declaring themselves brothers. In the winter she warmed it beside the fire, wrapped it in a towel, and used it to heat her feet. When she needed to send a signal, she used it to catch the light.
She called to all the Librarians in the area, and we went down six flights to her brain bunker. The stainless cubbies down there dated to years before the mess seized power, when somebody’d had an idea about keeping rare books safe in case of disaster.
Soon we were standing in the Needle’s knowledge shelter, around the table that held my daddy’s body. There he was, stripped naked and covered in tattoos, all of him made of words except the hole in his heart. I’d never seen him undressed before. In our house, he’d worn a darned suit, buttoned to the neck, none of his ink visible.
“Man needs a hat and tie at all times,” he’d say to me. The rest of him was startling to me. My daddy specialized in invisible ink, and the tattoos between the lines, he’d told me when I was little, would only show up if you shone a candle through his skin. I’d never seen them; there was no way to see them on someone who was alive.
Read after burning, I thought, and couldn’t think it anymore. I stood beside the table, at the level of my daddy’s head, put my hand on his cheek, and felt the stubble of his beard poking through his story.
“Sharp, Volume One,” barked the Needle, and we brought out our knives.
I was the one who was meant to cut the first page of the book of Silas Sharp. That’s what you did if the book was your parent.
The Librarians rolled up their sleeves. Arms tattooed in a hundred colors and designs, the secret history of the former world. They had shaven skulls beneath their hats, and their heads were wrapped with Ada Lovelace and Hypatia and Malcolm X, with the speeches of Shirley Chisholm, with Chelsea Manning, with the decoded diagrams of the Voynich Manuscript. Their arms were annotated with Etty Hillesum’s diary of life before Auschwitz, with Sappho’s fragments, with Angela Davis, with Giordano Bruno, with Julian of Norwich, with bell hooks, with the story of the Union soldier who began as Jennie Hodgers and volunteered herself to fight as Albert Cashier, with Bruno Schulz, with Scheherazade, with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, with Danez Smith, with Roxane Gay, with Kuzhali Manickavel, with the motions of the planets, with the regrets of those who’d dropped bombs, with the sequencing of DNA, with the names of the dead, with almanacs and maps, with methods for purifying water, with primers for teaching letters, with names of criminals, stories of pain, dreams of better things.
None of this was categorized as magic, but it was magic nonetheless. All of this was the daily light, the brightness, the resistance, and refusal of intellect to endure extinction.
“What’s that?” I asked one old man, dark skin and a silver beard, his text luminous in the shadows of the bunker.
“Dictionaries, Enry,” he said. They were tattooed in pale ink. “Glow-in-the-dark microscript,” he said, and smiled at me. “I made it out of worms. This arm is Oxford English, but English isn’t all there is. There are words here that’ve never been defined.”
“Which should be the first page of my daddy?” I asked him.
“I’d say you should start there, with Silas’s heart.”
“But there’s something missing,” I said.
“There’s always something missing,” said the Dictionarian. “Usually the missing sections aren’t marked as simply as they are on Silas.”
“I can’t decide,” I said.
“We’ve never been a simple people, Enry,” said the Needle. “Nowhere, nohow, nobody. This decision isn’t simple, but you have it in you to make it.”
I lifted my scalpel and started to cut. He’d still be warm on the inside. He’d only been dead two hours. But skin degraded quickly. You had to cut fast.
I touched my daddy’s heart. I looked for the words that were missing, that had been driven down into him. I’d seen my daddy dress for the bindings of other Librarians and come back into the house salt-scrubbed and drunk on moonshine. In those early mornings, my daddy would tell me about the books.
“There’ve been many books made this way,” he’d say. “Long ago, books were made of animals. There were pocket bibles made of vermin—mice and rats—and fables made of rabbits. There were histories written on the skin of foxes, and there is at least one book in the world—or was—that was said to be bound in unicorn. There’s a sea volume, a tremendous novel calligraphed on vellum made of the skin of a blue whale.”
“A whale?” I asked.
“No one has seen a whale for a long time,” my father said, “but when I was a boy, I went on a ship and saw a whale blow, and then its tail as it dove, and that was story enough for me. This very library, the University’s, had a serpent’s story, inked into a seventeen-foot snakeskin, accordion-folded. The history of written words is, at least in part, once, and now again, a history of skin.”
“What about the skin of people?” I asked.
“There’ve been other versions of this kind of library,” he told me. “Lampshades and wallets. There’ve been bodies stolen throughout the history of humans, but the books bound into the Library of the Low are made not of stolen bodies but given ones. There’s nothing unholy in turning your own body into a bible for the living.”
“How do you know?” I asked him.
“I don’t,” he said. “But I studied under the Needle, and what I know about the world’s words, I know from her. We make our bodies into things that can last. We are not destined for coffins, nor for crypts. Our bodies will live on in the library, and one day, maybe, the world will change because of us.”
“But they’re only books,” I said.
“There’s magic written into them. The Needle taught me some old things.”
He pointed at his chest, at a line of text, and around the line, for a moment, there was something else, a brightness—calligraphy made of fire. Then it was gone.
Now my blade went in there, beside the word beginning. This was my job too, to read out the first page of Sharp, Volume I. I would, one day, be Sharp, Volume II.
“In the beginning,” I whispered, “time started in secret.”
“Long before the stories said it started, and long after,” said the Needle.
“This is how we bury our dead,” I said. That was the line assigned to me. “This is how we find a path to heaven.”
I sliced down the page, a rectangle. The room exhaled Silas Sharp’s name, and I was done with the part I had to do, the start of the book.
The Librarians would scrape and stretch gently, to keep the pages from tearing. They’d be the ones who’d tattoo and inscribe the rest of my daddy, his bones and his fingernails, all night and into the next day, turning flesh into future. They could make pages that were thin enough to see sentences through, and the book of Silas Sharp, in the end, would contain at least a million words, written on every part of his body. His skull would be sliced into transparent coins, and his hair would be woven into the threads that would hold the binding. The muscles of his heart would be the toughest pages, inscribed with words my daddy had given to the Needle long ago. All Librarians gave their dedication to her.
I went back to the Needle’s house to cry. Even if this was how the world was, I would have traded all the knowledge in the universe for my daddy telling me a bedtime story, for him sitting in our kitchen in his hat, humming to himself as he tattooed an animal in iambic pentameter.
We’d had plenty of words in the history of humans, but still, it was easy to take them away. Thousands of years of progress had been obliterated by the time I was born. Knowledge couldn’t keep everything bad from happening; that was my first story, and it was a true one.
Knowledge wasn’t enough.
I had never known my mother, but her book—unfinished—was about how to build bombs out of normal household ingredients. Her back was tattooed in formulas for Greek fire, and her cheekbones with love songs. They were part of the book too.
She had all this knowledge written on her skin, but still she died.
On the day my father was killed, I thought that knowledge was no use to me, that we would have been better off warring, running outside and fighting the soldiers. They were murderers, and I wanted revenge. Instead, I had a story I couldn’t understand, the invisible ink of my father’s tattoos, unreadable, useless. I raged in the basement, my own skin free of words, my heart free of forgiveness. Love was not enough, and neither were words. Nothing was enough to replace him.
I imagined myself to sleep: the men in charge, and the way I’d slay them, paring their skin from their bones, twisting their hair into ropes. I’d use their skeletons for my bed frame, and their hearts, I’d throw on the fire. They wouldn’t be dedicated. They’d only be dead.
Yes: This is how we did it in those days. This is what we’d, from some angles, been reduced to, and from others, evolved toward. Books were written to be read, and we were writing them, making them, creating them, in a treeless place.
When the Needle got the idea to make the Skincyclopedia, it was because paper had gotten banned to everybody but the bodies willing to swear they’d never ever write anything wrong as long as they lived. Then paper got rendered illegal in favor of just a few things you could yell, four or five words at a time. There was a decree saying you weren’t allowed to teach your babies to speak anymore, or to teach them to read. You were allowed the slogans, and beyond that, they’d show you pictures and films of how they wanted you to be.
The Needle remembered a time before all the books were banned, a time when even the crumbling scrolls were digitized and available for viewing.
“I can’t hear a word you say,” the Needle’d said, legendarily, when one of the men in charge came to her door, asking her to be their translator.
The men in charge were afraid of encrypted communication among the rebels and wanted someone who knew things about codes and cabals. Knowledge had become frightening to the powers that were, and they’d decided to make it invisible. The Needle didn’t understand their logic.
Written history was filled with men like them, calling themselves heroes as they destroyed everyone else. The Needle told them she was fixing to die out like a dodo anyway and that she’d gone and forgotten everything but a recipe for piecrust. She went back into her house and closed the door in their faces.
“Are you writing down all the books you know?” my daddy asked the Needle when he first began to do the library with her.
“No,” the Needle said. “I’m making a new story out of the old stories. This story”—she called out the name, something about mice, something about men—“this one has a wife, killed for no reason. This one too. And this one. This one has a boy hung up in a lynching tree. This one has an eleven-year-old girl narrated into existence by the man who rapes her. This one has a scientist dying of cancer, her husband getting credit for her discoveries. This one has dozens of people trying to swim across a river and shot from the banks. This one has a child dying because his family can’t afford medicine. This one has a boy murdered because he loves boys.”
“You’re writing down the American collection again?” my daddy asked the Needle. Those stories sounded like the way the world was.
“No,” said the Needle. “There are some stories here that are holy. Others, I think, may benefit from being remembered differently.”
That was how this started.
By the time my daddy was murdered, the Needle and her Librarians were fourteen years into the Library of the Low. There were no margins, not on most of the first generation of Librarians, and not on any of the animals either. One of our goats was tattooed with a version of The Odyssey in which Penelope and the witches were the heroes, and another wore the secrets of manned flight, starring Amelia Earhart, Carlotta the Lady Aeronaut, Sally Ride, and Miss Baker—the first American monkey to survive weightlessness. There were shelves and shelves of stories.
“Knowledge,” said the Needle every Sunday, when we met to pray over poems, “is the only immortal. We leave our words behind us. It is our task to pass them properly.
“Holy!” she said, reading from one of her own arms, quoting one of the poets. “Holy! Holy! Holy!”
“Holy the eyeball,” the children echoed.
“Holy the abyss,” she replied. This was not the only poem the Needle quoted. She had a hymnal of her chosen poets, but this one was a simple one, an annotation of things the world was trying to render obsolete.
“apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist / bracken exists; and blackberries, blackberries,” she said next, quoting another poet, Inger Christensen. There was an alphabet of lines tattooed on her other arm. “fig trees and the products of fission exist; /errors exist, instrumental, systemic, / random; remote control exists, and birds; / and fruit trees exist.”
“Amen,” we said. “Amen.”
It is crucial to remember, and it is the history of stories, that even the righteous resort to wrongs. That even the magical can be frightened, and that even the revolutionary can fail when they curl into comfort. There are many nights in a lifetime, if it is long, and some of them must be spent sleeping. It is crucial to remember that even in groups of the good, humans are still humans, and bodies are still fragile, that uncertainty can take over and that when it does, there is no option but shouting strength back into the crowd. There are stories about perfection, but those stories are lies. No one ever made the world better by being perfect. There is only mess in humans, and sometimes that mess turns to magic, and sometimes that magic turns to kindness, to salvation, to survival.
Every Sunday, when the Librarians met at the Needle’s bunker, there was a vote taken on what to do, but the vote always came down on the side of staying secret.
“There is a long history,” said the Needle. “Of monks and nuns guarding the books instead of joining the war. And yet, the time may come. Is it today? Have we done enough to preserve? Is it time to rise?”
The hands went up. It was not.
I visited my parents in the library and put them on the table in front of me, memorizing their contents, filling in their gaps. I read the rest of us, the dead I’d never met and the dead I knew. I read stories about love and about murder, stories about farming and about revolution. I read the library end to end, books from the immigrants who’d come from the south and the ones who’d come across the oceans, books from the people who’d been born here on this ground and died here too.
I pressed my hands to my parents’ pages and turned them. There was a full-page illustration of a woman warrior with a sword, and I looked at that most often. My mother’s book. My father’s book had a full page of my mother herself, wearing her glasses, working on the bibliography of rage and weaponry for the gone, for the America I’d never encountered, one full of dirt roads and donut shops, unplundered graveyards and grocery stores, skyscrapers and sugarcane. Police cars, pummeling. Immigrants, ICE agents. Hunger and hunger and hunger. Hurt.
“Holy,” I whispered. “Unholy.”
In the early mornings, the world was lost in translation, a language the soldiers and the men in power didn’t speak. There was fog, and in the night there was a warming river, and we brought people over it. There were babies born and new stories written, but we stayed the same, hidden in the Library of the Low, keeping knowledge from being burned, while the rest of the world caught fire.
I got my first tattoo as a copy of something from my mother’s book, a katana down my spine, and my second tattoo from my father’s book, a pen down the center of my chest, the same size as the sword. This was my family tree, quill and blade, ink and metal, the same importance, the same time. The back cover and the front. Who knew what my pages would contain? Who knew which of these things was mightier?
I didn’t remember the past, and I couldn’t imagine the future. I held off on more tattoos, and though everyone wondered, they didn’t force me. There was no forcing a generation without memory of libraries. We had not memorized paper books. We had not touched trees.
Read after burning, I thought, and went to my father’s book, and looked at it in the dark, but I couldn’t burn it. It was all I had of him, his book and his bones, the words he’d chosen.
I held a candle to the page with the hole from his heart, and there was nothing of wonder on it, nothing magic.
Out there, in the rest of the country, people shouted their slogans and were rendered speechless. We farmed under lights we’d made and hoarded knowledge because there was no way to share it. We kept electricity on Earth. When we died, we were meant to pass the knowledge on our skin forward, not lose it on a battleground.
When I went to sleep at night, I could smell the towns around ours being burned: smoke full of story, secrets drifting overhead, but we took no action. We had a tiny world of our own, and that world was filled with our rituals and ceremonies, with our history, with our books made of the people we’d loved. We thought, for a time, that it was enough to save ourselves.
This was not the Needle’s plan.
What is anyone’s plan? The idea that the world will remain viable, that there will be no clouds of poison, no blight, no famine, is an optimistic one. The idea that one’s children will survive even birth? Also optimistic. And yet.
When I was sixteen, one of our books got out into the world, the pages thin and the text intricate, and someone made up a story about it. There was a whisper that we were making books out of babies, converting them into the thinnest paper, tattooing their soft skin and turning it into a history of lies. These weren’t even babies that had been born, the story went, but babies we’d preempted from birth, to turn into pocket bibles of revolution.
The soldiers charged the Librarians with resisting the arrest of everything. We were, they said, worshipping idols and insisting on sentences. All of the Librarians were taken but the Needle, who was so old by now that they decided she’d die on the road.
The men insisted that the babies were everywhere, that they’d been born to women in their seventies, and nothing the Needle said could dissuade them. They’d inherited knowledge too and believed it as firmly as we believed ours.
“Who had a baby?” she shouted at them. “How can you think this is a town full of baby killers, if there’s no one of an age to give birth to them?”
Our Librarians were put into a wagon, some screaming, some shouting slogans other than the ones allotted us. The Needle and the children of the town were left behind, all of us hidden for our entire lives.
“It’s time to change the color of the ink,” the Needle said, when they were gone. “Sometimes bloodstains are the only writing you get to leave behind. Many of my people left nothing but red.” She looked at me, her eyes narrowed. “We’ll leave more than bloodstains. We’ll leave char.”
The Needle took us back down into her bunker, hobbling on the stairs.
“What are you willing to die for, Enry?” the Needle asked me. “You don’t always get to choose, but this time, you do. You, boy, you’re the one I’m talking to.”
I didn’t know.
“Open that door,” she said.
I unbarred it. It was a room full of vials and metal, as secret as the rooms full of books, but different from them. Maybe not different. This was a room full of things that could catch fire or slice strangers.
“There is nothing holy,” the Needle said, “about tradition. No tradition. Not mine, not theirs. Anyone who’s ever thought so has ruined things all over again.”
“But,” I said, “we made the library. We have to protect it.”
“We made the library because they tried to crush knowledge. We will fight because they tried to crush us,” said the Needle. She trembled, but not with fear.
“I’m ready to burn, Enry Sharp,” she said.
We loaded all the books of the Library of the Low into rolling carts, and we took the elevator, using power we normally saved. We rose up from the inside of the earth, beneath a stolen University, and when we came to the surface, we were a small army of young Librarians, and one old woman carrying a knife made of a melted medallion.
We marched.
The Needle once told me that we couldn’t fix everything with love, even though some of the books said we could. Some of the poems said it was the answer. Some of the anatomical diagrams of hearts showed them full of certainty. I thought about my father’s heart and the missing words inside it.
We marched for our parents, with them beneath our arms. We carried their skin and hair. We carried their words. We marched down a dirt road, and on both sides there were places consumed by smoke.
“Holy,” we said.
High above us there was a swallow spinning, and below us seeds were still germinating and we were walking in boots we’d inherited, carrying daggers forged of our parents’ wedding rings and jewelry.
“There aren’t enough of us,” I said to the Needle, as we arrived in the City. Walls of windows, broken. Buildings crumbling, but behind them I could see movement.
“There are,” she said, and unbowed her lace collar. I could see words beginning to be revealed there, round and round her throat. The Needle’s eyes were blacker than her ink, and her skin shone silver.
We stood in the center of the road and looked at the house, white columns built on the backs of Americans. Graffiti on its sides and trees from which bodies had hung. Some people had thought this was a beautiful place.
I opened a book in each of my hands, the book of Silas Sharp, and the book of Yoon Hyelie Sharp. Beside me, the rest of the Librarians opened the books of their parents, and the ones whose parents had been taken readied their implements.
The doors began to open and there were soldiers coming for us. We saw men standing there, old as the Needle. The Needle stood at the head of our formation, tall and unbound, her shirt open, and in her hand she held a torch.
We all knew that we were about to die. There was nothing in us that was stronger than the guards here, and there were only a few of us to begin with. There were good ways to die, and this was one of them.
“READ AFTER BURNING!” we screamed, and we set fire to our dead.
I set fire to the book of Silas, and out of it rose my father, and I set fire to the book of Yoon, and out of it rose my mother.
The Needle set fire to herself and we closed our eyes at the light she made, the way her body blazed and hissed, words made of magic, words made of the Needle’s own rage and reading.
This was the Needle’s analysis of civilization, and this was her love, given form. This was what magic looked like at this point in the history of the world, a surge of stories transmitted in smoke.
I had never seen my parents together until I saw their books. I watched their skin insist on change and the spells contained within their volumes spitting fire. What can you see in firelight? More than you can see in the dark. I watched my mother’s sword and my father’s pen stand at attention, and then I watched them switch instruments.
I felt my own living skin warming in the light of the people I’d come from, the library that had raised me thus far, the stories that had been altered to show something other than quiet.
The Needle rose over us, a cloud of words, and she rushed at the men who’d decided America belonged to them. With her rushed the rest of the Librarians, resurrected to revolution, brought back to life with the magic of burned libraries and belief.
The old men stood, looking up, five of them, skinny, pale, and blinded, as the words of my people circled them, closed in on them, and redlined them out of the story. I watched as the Needle edited. I watched my daddy and my mother making a study of this part of our history, shredding them into fire and then into ash.
These are the parts of our story that, while alive, are also at rest. The lies entwined with lives, the magic used for shrinking the span of knowledge rather than encouraging it to grow.
My hands were open, and in them were flames. I kept my hands open as I fought. My hands were full of story.
Our knives were used too, bloodied on the living, but the living soldiers were surrounded by the words of the dead, and we were stronger than we thought we were. An army of children, but we’d been raised on something better than this.
I was the one watching when the Needle finished them, her hair flying up in the wind, each strand a sentence. I watched her words rush into their throats, filling them with stories they were not a part of. There was char, and an old white house on fire, and smoke filled with forgotten things.
I didn’t know the world before the end of the world, but I knew it when it began again, out of dust and dark, out of whispers and bones.
There were twelve children, and then there was rain.
Was any of this magic? Not more so than the magic made in spring, and not more so than the spinning of the seasons. It is crucial to remember that none of this is certain, that even when joy is proximate, sorrow might be walking beside it. Indeed, it is crucial to remember how to extend your hand to someone different from your own self.
Magic is unpredictable. That’s for you to remember. Kindness is too. It is all part of the same continuum, just as you and I are part of the same line. It would be years yet before I met the man I would love, and years before you would be born to a child of a child of his, crying in the arms of the midwife, fingers spread. This would not be the only revolution. There’s never just one. This is how it begins.
“Enry,” my father said as his smoke faded. By then it was dawn, and we were standing on the lawn of this building built to show what glory looked like from a distance.
“Henry,” my mother said, as her embers died down.
The two of them looked around, and I could see their tattoos glowing like birds might, if the world was a world where birds lived, or like whales might, deep in the sea and looking for love, calling out in song to others of their kind. Not everything was gone. Some things were invisible, and other things had been in hiding and were coming out again.
“What does this word mean?” you ask me, and you touch a word on my skin, red ink, because after the world began again, we used red instead of black, to say that we had blood flowing and that nothing was fixed in forever.
“What do you think it means?” I ask. The meanings change along with the words. The text on my skin is a new story daily, and here is what I know.
I wake up every morning, and the world has changed overnight. I can feel my father’s blood and my mother’s magic, and I can feel the Needle, her body blowing apart.
When do things change entirely, you wonder? When do they get better? When will it be possible?
It is possible now.
You’re built to open your fists, and show me your palms, and to pass food from them into the hands of others. You’re built for comfort and for fire, for battle and for poetry, and you are a child of my family, and my family was made by the world.
Here we stand in the dark now, and I’m old and you’re holding my hand and walking me from the bed to the window. We’re looking out at all of it, the wonder and the danger. There are voices and the sun blazes, and everything is bright enough that if I were reading the letters on your skin, I wouldn’t be able to parse them.
Now look at your own hands and the wrinkles in them. Those wrinkles are what happen when you clench your fists. You were born for this resistance, for this preparation, for this life. You were born to fight.
MARIA DAHVANA HEADLEY is the New York Times bestselling author of six books, including the novels Magonia and Aerie and, most recently, The Mere Wife, a contemporary novel adaptation of Beowulf, to be followed by a new verse translation of Beowulf in 2019, both from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her short fiction has been nominated for the World Fantasy, Shirley Jackson, and Nebula awards and included in many Year’s Best anthologies, including three times in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Headley is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.