The Book Censor's Library

by Bothayna Al-Essa

Reading was a bad habit, but you couldn’t keep people from doing it, just as you couldn’t keep them from smoking or having sex. All you could do was limit their options, give them the illusion of choice. Then, all on their own, they would turn away.

But reality was a brick wall: firm and unwavering. All the same, if reality was so unavoidable, then why didn’t it stop her?

Imagination would always find minuscule pores in the delicate skin of reality—he knew that now. It would squeeze its way through to the surface.

He had made up his mind about hell: it was where the difference between what was real and what was imagined ceased to exist.

“When the world is this abysmal, getting used to it is the worst thing that can happen to you.”

Every day, we take the risk of hacking the Censorship Authority’s systems to rescue the books, the research, just so we can save our collective memory. Salvage some sort of idea about what we were before. But we’ve never been strong enough to save a child, to save the future.