The Fruits of Our Labour

The walls are charred to pitch, burnt books crumbling on the stone floor as the last tendrils of smoke crawl upwards from the curling pages and wisp away.

It happened again. 

Pietro remembers to hide this time, setting himself behind the mahogany desk with his blindfold bound tight around his head, hands pressed against his ears. It took him a few times to get used to the sight, the blaze so wild and blinding it felt akin to barrelling towards an eclipse. The sound came next, the pop and crackle and fizz drumming in his skull, ricocheting throughout his marrow.

 But he’s never figured out how to drown out the smell. For even after the lights dim and the sounds fade, that smell always lingers, thick sulphur burning through his throat and leeching onto his prickled skin.

The first time it happened he threw up onto a study table.

It only made clean-up worse.

He stomached it after that.

Now, he sighs, gazing out at the blacked massacre and at the library motto embossed on the far wall: words are nothing without people to create them.

He found it amusing at first, for now the words were nothing at all, nothing but ash and memory.

He picks up a dust-pan and brush.

Pietro is young, early twenties, with a strong build and tanned completion. Like many his age, he is deeply in debt from years wasted at University and was quick to accept the first high paying job he could find.

Night Security at his local library.

He scoffs, shovelling a pile of flaky ash into a trash bag. It was odd. Though the walls and books always charred and burned away, the shelves never did. He would have thought that if they were using fire-resistant spray, they would use it on everything they could.

He once suggested this to his manager Abigail, who narrowed her wide eyes and shook her bushy head at him, utterly perplexed. 

If he were a more curious person he might have asked more questions, but the job was relatively easy and these nights only happened on Bad Days.

And although he only came in after dark, there was someone who knew when the Bad Days were. Because there on the front desk, resting as peacefully as a child tucked into bed, was the thin strip of black fabric beaconing the Bad Days, left out for him like a reassuring hand squeeze before he stepped into the inferno.

Whoever left him the fabric knows of the blaze, but no one ever speaks of it while the sun shines down.

No one knows of it.

Coughing, Pietro sweeps another pile of ash into the trash bag when his eyes catch on a white triangle poking out from beneath a shelf.

Crouching down, Pietro tugs on the triangle, the loose parchment moving easily with his hand and revealing a small square of hauntingly thin Bible-like paper. Turning it over tentatively in his ashen hands, Pietro examines each inch of the paper, but no words appear on it. 

It doesn’t make any sense. 

All books, all pages, in the library are reduced to ash during the blaze. Pietro has never understood why but he has understood that much.

A spark on intrigue whirs through his weary body and he crouches lower, pressing his cheek to the caked stone floor, scanning underneath the shelves. But there’s nothing there.

Nothing but this one miracle slip of paper.

 Pietro shakes his head thoroughly, as if he can physically remove the image of the paper and the slight ringing in his ears.

Yet there it remains in his onyx coloured fingertips. 

He tucks it away in his breast pocket, unsure why but feeling the sudden and intense need to keep it near him. 

Once the ash is swept away, Pietro makes the long trek downstairs. Through the steel pad-locked door, the ever-thinning corridor, and into the cavern below. Sprawling and deep, the underground bunker is filled with floor-to-ceiling shelves, all boasting rows upon rows of identical blank books.

“Your job is simple, really.” Abigail had told him that first day, over two weeks ago. “Guard the library, and replace any missing books with copies we keep in the basement.”

Naturally, Pietro assumed she was implying that people stole books. Lord knows he had done it enough times as a kid when he was desperate for study materials and his mom couldn’t afford to feed him and his brothers, let alone a textbook.

He never fathomed that the library would burst into a supernova and reduce everything to smoke and ash.

Pietro places the trash bags in the large bins by the entrance, and grabs the nearest empty cart.

One by one, as the night wears on, Pietro carts the masses of books from the basement and back onto the now ash-free shelves upstairs. One by one, each shelf is replenished, decked in white hardcovers without a speck of ink on any of them.

“There are no words in the books.” Pietro had told Abigail at the end of his shift, the first night the blaze happened. He was exhausted, his limbs limp and heavy at his sides. “They’re empty.”

Abigail had raised her eyebrows curiously and looked over his shoulder. Turning, Pietro blinked. There, before him, as though it always had been, was an entire library, filled with colour and dappled with individuality.

It was a trick of the moonlight. He told himself.

“Just do your job.” Abigail told him. “It’s not that hard.”

Finally, the sun rose, Pietro’s weathered body slumped back against the desk. He watched as the streaks of gold shot through the windows, casting amber along the wood. He tried desperately to keep his eyes open, to see it happen, but he was so, so, so tired, and with the pull of the tides, his eyelids drew close, and when they opened again, everything was in colour.

~

Pietro picks up the thin strip of fabric left on the desk.

His entire body is worn, the blood sucked out of him. Indeed, his usually tanned skin has taken on the complexion not unlike the moonlight speckled along the ash.

Positioning himself, he places headphones over his ears this time, hoping to get some sleep for once. He can’t sleep during the day anymore. Even in the darkest of rooms he can feel the press of the sun outside, suffocating him, taunting him.

The blaze is quick this time.

For the remainder of the night, Pietro goes about his work, shovelling ash and carting empty books. All the while he feels the warming touch of the miracle paper against his heart. All the while he keeps scanning for another sign of life.

Nothing.

And as the sun begins to rise over the horizon, stippling the dust mites flying in the air, he fights against the pull of sleep to watch the change, to see it. But he is being dragged against the current, and he’s lost at sea, and again his eyes close and life begins behind his closed eyes.

~

Again and again and again.

Days turn to weeks and the weeks turn to mist and all Pietro knows is the ringing in his ears and the smell of sulphur. 

His brothers are getting concerned, commenting on the bruises carved under his eyes, on his slumped gait. They ask if he’s eating enough, he’s looking weak, they ask if he’s getting enough sleep, he’s always yawning, they ask if this, any of this, is worth it.

“The money is good.” He reminds them. “Really good.”

It’s enough to get them to stop asking. Because for the first time they are all able to sit and have a roast dinner together, for the first time in a while his mother smiles at him, biting back her tears. For the first time she’s able to take a day off.

It’s enough.

Through the cracks of relief he’s gifting, he begins to flinch at flickers of light, he can no longer stand the sound of the kettle singing. He can no longer take in his own reflection, for fear of catching life in his eyes.

All he does is shovel and cart, shovel and cart. Until his back aches and his fingers crack and he can barely stable his knees to stand.

And always, always, he waits to see the change.

Yet as his determination, his desperation, steadily builds, his body weakens and with a single blink, it happens without him.

Always.

~

He can only sleep during the blaze.

It’s become his one comfort. 

The one time of the day he knows what to expect, he understands what happens.

The blaze happens. Then it ends.

And for that brief period, he’s able to allow his weary body to rest, to give into to the heat and the burning as though it were a blanket meant to wrap around his body, as though he could feel his mother’s arms as they held him when he couldn’t sleep in the darkness as a child.

Now, he can’t bear the light, but needs it.

The blaze has happened every day this last week. It’s getting angrier and hotter.

Sure enough, when he walks in, the bare bones of him withered and crumbling like the pages of a book, there lies the thin strip of fabric on the desk.

Lifting his hand to his heart, he rests his palm against that slip of miracle paper, as though it could breathe life back into him.

He’s so tired.

Exhausted.

It will happen soon, he knows.

Glancing up, his gaze fixates on that plaque across the room, those infernal words mocking him.

Words are nothing without people to create them.

“What about me!” He shouts, voice cracking like the pop of an inferno.

The library is silent in answer. Moonlight cascades in, sprinkling across the stacks and slipping through the gaps in a landscape of empty knowledge.

“I just want…” His words drip from his lips. “I just want to see it. Just once.”

Nothing but the moonlight and the books filled with words written by people he’ll never know, never be able to bring himself to care about.

“I just want to see it.”

Something hot warms his cheeks, and his grip tightens on the blindfold in his fist. But it’s not the blaze, not yet.

He’s crying.

A crackle sounds from within, breaking the gentle caress of moonlight, and he barely has time to suck in a breath before the library erupts in a supernova of flames.

Thrown back, he barrels into the desk, back shattering on impact. Pain floods through his boiling blood, his eyes burning with wetness, but he can’t find it in him to care anymore.

He just watches.

Luminous orange flames dart out from a writhing glowing sphere in the centre of the room. The flames lick the curling paper, tasting their own destruction before slinking back into the safety of the orb.

The ringing in his skull crescendos to a piercing thunder. Streaks of tears pour down his cheeks.

But he can’t stop watching.

It’s destruction. Pure, violent, human destruction.

It’s magnificent.

His heart clenches and he balls his fist against his chest, as though he could reach inwards and squeeze his heart until it was nothing but a crumbling pile of ash.

Removing the paper from his breast pocket, he holds it out to the flame, taunting the fire back. 

But there, against the burning light, clear swirls appear faint on the paper.

Coughing, he stumbles up quickly, leaning against a chair for support. The blaze burns on, brutal and consuming, but he drowns it out.

Carefully, he holds up the miracle paper to the blaze and gasps.

Watermarked on, barely visible without the burning light, words appear through the veil. 

Everything turns molten, the thunder ringing in his ears becomes muffled under water. The blaze itself seems to soften for him.

Through the waves of heat, he can only just make out the plaque at the other end of the library. 

Words are nothing without people to create them.

And here, written for him as he always knew them, visible only with the blaze he has grown to love as a mother.

We are the creators.

The paper drifts from his fingertips and he fully takes in the might and beauty of the blaze.

We are the creators.

His knees give in and he crashes to the ground, cheek splitting against the stone and spilling crimson. Desperately he scrambles to turn, to find the blaze, to feel the luminous sphere of inferno as it devours everything.

It’s exquisite.

Clawing his fingers into the stone, he drags his decaying body closer, to feel the warmth, too see the change from within. 

It’s not enough. This can’t be enough.

I will create.

With a primal scream, he leaps up and embraces the blaze. It is livid and apoplectic and searing but it is his to hold, his to see, his to know.

He is nothing.

Nothing.

But he holds his destruction close.

Embraces it entirely.

Embraces his creation.