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.

“For a moment, I thought I’d surely lost you. It’s a vulnerable thing to have, a body.”

“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.”

“I don’t want to know another life without you in it.”