How Can I Help You

by Laura Sims

In the library, time is dammed up—not just stopped but saved. The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever. —Susan Orlean, The Library Book

Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person? —Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

It is madness to write things down. —Elizabeth Bowen, The...

She used the male pronoun for every scenario she described, so I wrote it down: he, he. And she was right, for the most part; the only times I’ve punched the numbers 911 into the phone, it’s been for men. Men can never keep their violence to themselves.

“The library is a community center now. It’s a gathering place. We want people to come together and, yes, talk, if they want to. We want young people to come here and

Sometimes, when the bath fails, the fire succeeds. Fire succeeds: that’s something I learned as a child—standing safely back from a house ablaze—and I’ve never forgotten it.

I try to take all this in, but I never imagined a body.

This lady clearly hasn't been to Boston.

I hate her right now: she suffered a blow; she picked herself up. Now she’s stepped back into her meaningful life. And she makes it look easy. It isn’t—for some of us.

like a soldier weary from defeat but still facing her foe.

These similes are horrible. Too many and not good.

like one of the babes in the nursery,

Not another lame smilie

She wants to pick me apart like those fictional villagers.

like an eager child.

like the feeling I used to have when I finished changing a bedpan.

like a dainty bird,

If she’s furiously taking notes about the databases, I’ll be hanged.

like a doctor reading a doomed patient’s chart.

He’s told me before that he hates the miasma of social welfare and desperation filling the air of even the nicest, newest, most sleekly designed libraries.

What exactly is wrong with caring about other people?

“Good-bye, Dan,” I say.

Dan needs The Breakup PowerPoint Presentation!