It Sleeps In The Cupboard Next To The Flour

There’s a hold on my soul. Someone’s waiting there on the other side, but I am not fucking returning it yet. The fines keep mounting. They never get paid. I keep waiting to hear from the abyss, a letter informing me of the state of my account, politely assuming that I am driven by a fear of consequences, assuming that I am driven to make my payment schedule more manageable, assuming that I have peace of mind in the distance, off there away from here somewhere, waiting for me, as if my serenity were simply something to be traded for the past due balance I have acquired. My load grows heavier, and all I can say to you is, “Give me more.” Every time I walk into the library, with my soul under my arms - it is not a slim volume - fluttering gently (as the little spritle's feathery wings tend to do indoors) and sending little tufts of down whispering to the floor, the librarian gives me an evil eye. She has been watching me. She has been Keeping Track. She knows me.

I usually smile back, no matter how sour her face gets. I want to let her know that I am unruffled, if my soul is a little uneasy. I am perfectly content. She keeps one of these old-fashioned ledgers, the kind with columns built in, for marking the books, call numbers, names, and dates she loans out. She sometimes pretends to make a little note in her ledger when I walk by. I know she has nothing to mark in the space next to my name, because I have seen the column headings, and there is nothing of subjective value to be recorded there. Only concrete fact finds a place in her leather-bound kingdom. She cannot place a check in the box marked ‘douche bag.’ There is no box marked thus, and she is too dim or lazy to create one. Until I return my soul, she has no right to calculate a fine, and she knows it as well as I do. The librarian’s cat’s-eye glasses dangle precariously above the precipice of her nose. A gold-colored chain hooked to the arms of the glasses sags behind her neck, covered in back by a foreboding curtain of wheat-colored hair. The neck under that hair must be white as driven snow, but I wonder if anyone has ever seen it. She would be sexy, even, if she didn’t look so terse all the time.

My soul was sitting on the magazine shelves, uncategorized next to Sports Illustrated and Sporting News, when I found it. Maybe if the librarian spent more time re-filing books and less time judging people I would never have stumbled over my soul in the first place, so I guess I have to thank her for that. Maybe that’s what the smile is for: “You keep it up, you are doing good work: look at what I’ve got.” I was just looking for back issues of Spin magazine to read up on what I’d been missing. I know Spin isn’t necessarily everything, but it beats Rolling Stone these days.

So there my soul was, wrapped up in a yellow baby blanket, one of those unimaginably soft, hypoallergenic things that end up so covered in vomit and burp-up that they are crusty and useless. This one was still good, although there were a few flecks of blood from where my soul had bled a little. My soul coughed and creaked a little when I opened it up, as I imagine the door to a long-sealed mausoleum would if it were disturbed. I used to carry my soul around in that baby blanket all the time, because I was worried it would burn or peel, but it kept squirming out. In this way I knew it had recovered and needed to be free. More or less; I can’t just set it into the wild. It was never feral and so would be devoured in short order. To let it loose among those volumes of dense, mysterious encyclopedias and cutting psychological thrillers, not to mention the SF mind-benders…things could get dangerous quickly. You have to work up to these things. I’ve been introducing it to Curious George and some young adult fiction, a few mealy-mouthed spiritual texts, and collections of ghost stories here and there. When it gets stronger, it can begin to trudge through the classics and the canon, into the outer reaches of the philosophical void, or even into Romance or Westerns. I have no prejudice. But for now I keep it on a short leash with close scrutiny.

It’s not as if I am not taking care of my soul, and besides, it’s mine by all rights. I accidentally donated it when I gave away a bunch of books. It must have jumped into the box; it’s my fault for not paying attention, but you’d think the library would be more forgiving about that kind of thing. No, sir. “Yes, we do have a soul here, sir, but it’s in the archives.” I didn’t have time to wait two weeks while they dusted it off, so I gave up hope and just went about my business for a while. Since it was the only library in town, and I like to read but have scant spending money, I kept returning, without any thought of my soul. It just didn’t occur to me.

Until the day I saw it on the shelf. I am not giving it back. I may have to move, change my name and face, my social security number and banking information, my identity, so that I can live and again borrow books from a public library. I may have to learn a new language, take up exercise or recreational drug use, take part in a race for public office, set myself on fire, or eat strange and beautiful creatures I had previously thought were mythical. My soul will be my guiding light. The red tape, the bureaucracy of naming and of facts, the struggling against the restrictive would all be meaningless were it not for the singularity of my purpose, the wholeness and ineffability of my soul.Inscrutable, inseparable, indestructible. We will, must, conquer; and we will, must, be conquered unto ourselves.