Marcus Graves

Marcus Graves, at four-feet tall, was the loudest living being to ever stumble through the stacks of the Canaday library.  Crashing among the introverted Cowper and his trembling animals, rumbling through Rilke's quiet sagacity, resounding over the Rosettis and other Romantics, blaring out Byron, Burke, and Beetcher-Stowe, one would have hardly thought the miniature monsoon to ever have been called to be a librarian. 

He was easy to miss at the circulation desk.  Many a time, a student, mostly volleyball girls who towered over six feet, would stare idly out the glass front door until a sharp voice demanded them to stoop over the desk searching for Graves. Sometimes, when you're not looking right, you can smoothly pass him by like a stray flower or skittering crab on a beach. However, this never lasted long, for he was almost always audaciously audible in his scuttling, swift gestures.

In spite of the unending din that accompanied him, Graves was a meticulous and careful man.  His short stature was contrasted even more greatly by his long, piano-player fingers, constantly perfectly manicured.  It was these fingers – the only deft and silent part of his physique – that kept Graves from ever dropping a book with one exception.  In 1986, when trying to move the Ante-Nicean fathers from one floor to another, Graves spotted the sheen of a cockroach frozen on the stairs.  Roaches were his most formidable nemesis after spending graduate school in Hartford in an apartment where his mornings were greeted with a small swarm collocating on his blanket.  Without a soul in sight, Graves dropped the tomes down to the crush the roach's spindly armor and cast it into oblivion.

He gladly paid the $125 to replace the roach-mottled cover.

Often students heard Marcus from three floors away,  his wheezy, whooping way.  Students swore that they could even hear his eyes blink.  It was was if the tiny librarian was sinewed in sound.  A creaky femur here; a whooshing hair there; a scrippy, scrapy movement of fingernails against the leather spines.

Last year, the noise ended. After 26 years, the library finally lapsed into its natural state of silent reserve.  It was then that they began to play static over the loudspeakers because nobody could stand to stay in there otherwise.

She knew she had to forgive him.  There was no choice.  He was in Birmingham now, far away from the bustling Asian metropolis she had found herself in.  It was what, a 15 hour time difference between them? 

The sun was easing into early evening, making each pair of slacks she ironed glow in a golden aura of light.  The same sun was now rising on him and Alabama, ushering in the stifling still days of August, confirmed by the locusts frying in the trees and the constant threat of rain in the distance.  He was up already, mind abuzz with ideas, hands unable to stop moving across the sink, grasping the razor, then the gel, then a hat to sit slightly tipped to the right.  At least three girls would look at him when he boarded the bus in East Thomas down to the Children's Hospital where he interned.  He wouldn't smile, just raise his chin a bit in half-interest and sit down with his broad thumb already nudging into the darkness of another novel's immaculate pages.  He never bought used books, only new ones, and once he finished the new ones, he always passed them on without the care to ever see them returned.  That was one of the reasons why she had liked him: a strong chin and eccentricities.

One thing she knew for sure, he had not quite forgotten her yet.  She was a fuzzy, fond memory left to dwell in the same room as bonfires with friends, and Guinness on poker nights.  In short, he had no idea that she had slowly unraveled the burnt sienna scarf he had found behind the door of the library and given to her, passed along his old books to a friend to furtively reshelve in his collection of new ones, and brought upon their silence with a careful, calculated deliberation.

She looked around at the small, simple room she had arranged just so.  She had to forgive him.  She was determined.  A wilted couplet of snapdragons let their petals fall on the table, a few plates from dinner lay askew near the sink, and on the floor was the picture, the only she had brought with her -- unintentionally.  Until an hour ago, it had been tucked in the corner of a yet unopened book, one of her own that she had bought based on his recommendation, and couldn't yet bring herself to read. 

She looked their image indifferently laying on the floor: they stood together, he and her, looking stunned.  When the man who had taken the photo had counted to two, not three, and pressed the shutter, she knew immediately it was a moment where everything and nothing was posed.  Behind them one could see the large cage filled with birds, all kinds of birds, frozen on their metal swings -- the feathers, manufactured pomp and the eyes, pinpricks of plastic poked into styrofoam, all of it forming a menagerie of artifice.

Being a firm believer in reasons and not coincidences, she decided to peel apart the apartment, removing everything on the walls that she had obtained in the past three months: prints, photographs, schedules.  The sudden and stark whiteness frightened her, but she dutifully tacked the photo across from the couch at the centre of the living room wall with a brass pin, one end precariously shifted toward the ceiling. 

That night, after finishing the ironing and the dishes, she slept on the couch, leaving all the lights on, and each time she awoke that evening and saw the picture, she remembered.

“The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass of wealth of information, but to face sacred moments.”
-Abraham Joshua Heschel

The night God called me to be a writer was a lonely, silent evening in August. The fireflies that lit up the June fields like a brushfire had dimmed into a smattering of speckled flashes among the trees. Stars cried out to one another inaudibly in the terrible depths of night sky, and I walked barefoot along the corn fields, ankles drenched in dew. In three weeks, I would leave for university in Canada to prepare for a career in literacy development. However, as I stood still, hovering under the immense, soundless abyss, I could hear my heart pushing me toward the creation and management of words. Only surrounded by the overwhelming darkness of evening, suffocating the deceptive light of day, did the call to write sound so clearly. It was what I had always done.

It was what I would always do.