The Night of Many Endings

by Melissa Payne

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

Marlene could lose her temper, sure, like anyone her age who spent too much time consumed with absorbing any physical sign of how much her body betrayed her with its aches, its pains, its wanton lust to compress her body into nothing but nerve endings. But she was good at hiding it—or had been at one point in her life,