The Book Eaters

by Sunyi Dean

In short, Devon had always to act like prey, and not like the predator she had become.

Victims didn’t want your sorry-so-sorrys when you were hurting them, they wanted you to stop.

“Biblichor,” Uncle Aike liked to say, rolling the word in his mouth. “That is a word that means the smell of very old books. We love biblichor, here. And other old things.”

Reading was a shameful thing. We consume written knowledge, her aunts and uncles had said so many times. We consume and store and collect all forms of paper flesh as the Collector created us to do, clothed as we are in the skin of humankind. But we do not read, and we cannot write. Which was fine, except that everybody knew the Collector was never coming back. The book eaters would live and die without ever passing on their gathered information to the Collector’s unknowable data vaults. She couldn’t see the purpose behind their purpose.

Worn leather, loving hands, sweat, communion wine. Words flowed across her tongue, psalms merging with commandments, sacred newborns blending with war and desecration. Wafer-thin paper flesh crinkled delicately with every chew.

He had no more words to give; the pages of him were blank.

These men were dragons. Not true mythological beasts, but adult mind eaters, so-named for the stylized tattoos coiling around their throats.

“What do you fear, lady?” he asked. “A cage,” she said. “To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.” —J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

but that is the way fear serves us: it always sides with the thing we are afraid of.

“Someday I’m going to come back, hang it round your neck, and walk off with my daughter.”

Money had a way of curing human resentment.

All little children are beautiful.” Devon snapped the compass shut and wound the chain around her palm. “Adults, not so much. We’ve done too many things in our lives to be beautiful.”

Moors. Heather. Foxes. Otters. Sunshine and snow, barefoot in a thunderstorm. All those things existed and had been hers, yet she had managed only to pass on a legacy of pain.

How did one give shape to absence? Fill a black hole with light?

💔