J. F. Gleeson, author of noir flash fiction “BD1099.D4”, has previously published short fiction in Weird Horror, Ligeia, Maudlin House, The Daily Drunk, the Bear Creek Gazette, Beneath Ceaseless Skies and other places.
*****
2019
They closed down the library.
Not for any reason you might think.
The student called Georges on entering the building was wet through for a discarded marsupial texture, an unhealthy look gifted him and most others in the warren of dominoed books and mazed shelves by the week’s rain, water globbing still in strokes of coagulated smoke down the walls and panes.
From his desk and through the burrows, Georges on the trail of some book or other that he had decided he needed, for the disinterest of distraction over pressing want of research.
The halls smelled of tupperware meatballs and wet hair.
And it was emptier farther out into the stores.
And the book he wanted was not in its own place or any places observable to the bored.
And he picked up a book nearby.
And it smelled far thicker than the cloying lunches and damp.
And a pinch of hours later they closed down the library.
*****
1997
Kill it with knowledge, so a teacher once attempted to inspire his class.
And I did when I was young, a nature of the serial to the execution of:
Believing the governance of reality conducted by higher control and controllable at the level of man. DECEASED.
Believing the magic of the cinema attainable for real folk. DECEASED.
Believing the act of waking can be other than swill of dulled dreads. DECEASED.
Believing anything can happen that has not already happened. DECEASED.
The forced maintenance of knowledge in the classroom killed will of various kinds. I do not think these were meant by Mr Sands, and my apologies for failing him.
And so I didn’t and do not read, nothing anyway that does not say COMING TO CINEMAS THIS DECEMBER on the front. And these you read watching internet videos by which you can time an egg. And the glut of stories is accessed via ungated intravenous drip at nine ninety nine a month, or more, or less.
Which is relevant to what follows in the sense that anything is relevant to anything else, which are good detective words.
I was stuck the decades in the city because I forgot to leave. Other hubs had the tension of the inhaled breath, or the life of the outward. This, mine by idleness, the staid ambience of carcass collapse.
I got out of the car occupied by ten pin headache, the right and worse eyeball enacting a feeling of swelling upon the socket of my skull.
‘My eye feels like it’s gonna burst out of my face.’
‘Oh my God,’ said Tess.
She would fret in her sisterly way, little though it mattered drawn up against the scene, though I guess all right in that I was alive, and the male suspended from a polished chain in the strobe lit warehouse chasm was not.
‘Oh my God,’ Tess did not say.
The rectangle twenty three cm by about fourteen cm had been removed from the center of the back, a neatly peeled swatch just leaving room for family portrait or dinner menu. But the underneath muscle had not been overlaid with such.
We did not find out who had done this and to look at the scene you sort of knew.
The horrendous sticks with me far less than the unfinished, which I abhor and which slowly unmoors me and puts me out to the wilds and nightmare oceans.
Strike.
I packed my right eye shut and Tess did not mistake it for winking, this though a perfect place for a come-on.
‘The only place for a come-on,’ she said. ‘You need a glass of Solpadeine.’
*****
2019
They have closed down the library.
It has transpired that in 2003 a library employee across the country found an odorous textbook with a flap of something used as a bookmark. The book and the meat were thrown away.
So they have closed down some other libraries. And they are on track to perhaps close the bookshops down.
And here we are at the foot of the palace of knowledges with rain-whipped faces and lugs of the ashen rain bulging down the stone steps to where we stand like we are at the very beginning of something.
‘How’s your eye?’
*****
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