The Night of Many Endings

by Melissa Payne

Nora understood guilt and how it had long arms that circled and squeezed and made it hard to breathe.

libraries were one of the last places someone could go where they didn’t have to buy or believe in anything to come in.

The library had been like finding cool water in the midst of a desert, a refuge, and the books inside, her escape.

sometimes the best way to open someone’s mind was by listening, not arguing.

“Well, it challenged me to see that we are each the sum of our experiences and that every decision we make, every experience we have, leads us to this single moment in time.” She pointed to the floor for emphasis. “If all of our moments are important, then I wanted to use mine to help others, because you never know how it will all add up.”

“I think that my purpose is to give to others, to help in whatever way I can. And if it adds to their moments and experiences, if it shows someone who doesn’t think they’re worth it that someone thinks they are”—she

The truth was that life was unfair and unkind and full of broken promises.

Something about a college in Ohio?” Marlene inhaled a sharp breath. “Kent State?”

Of course, my school

“Yeah,” Jasmine said. “She said you were there and something terrible happened and that it’s kinda the reason she never saw you when she was growing up.” It’d happened in 1970, well before Nora was born, but she’d read about it, studied it a little bit in history. She knew that the students at Kent State had been protesting Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam War with the invasion of Cambodia. And that the National Guard was called in and four students were killed.

Nora had to sift through the scant bits she remembered learning in school about the shootings at Kent State. The controversy that the National Guard had acted in fear, that nobody should have died.