The Library of Shadows

by Rachel Moore

Alone carved out a canyon in her chest, deep grooves of a river run dry. She didn’t know how to fill it back up. She wasn’t sure she even wanted to, just for it to empty again.

There is life, there is death, and there is love—the greatest of these is love.

For someone who died before using a toaster, he sure thought he was the coolest thing since sliced bread.

There is life, there is death, and there is love.’” Somehow, Este knew what would come next.

“When you love someone, it’s like building a library and filling the shelves. It doesn’t matter how many years it’s been since Austen wrote Emma or Fitzgerald wrote This Side of Paradise. We can still pull them from the bookcases and dive back into the words, the same as the day they were written. All the years and memories are still right here, cataloged inside us.”

“Life and death together,” Mateo read, “create the complete human experience—no one without the other. What, then, perseveres? Like an oath sworn in blood, love ties the living to the dead, for you cannot know darkness without first knowing light.”

Maybe sepia-toned nostalgia was its own type of haunting. The ache of missing something you could never have again.

She’d assumed that if no one could be hers forever, they didn’t need to be hers at all.

Este smiled when she said yes. She kissed him, warm and sweet and soft, and she’d keep kissing him until their hair grayed, until their skin wrinkled, until dust gathered on the bookshelves. Eventually, they’d become nothing more than sun-faded ink, a final line in her favorite story, one she was no longer afraid to write.