The Shelves are Watching

Two eyes peered up at Sheila from the bookshelf. She knelt down to inspect them. The pair of plastic googly eyes were stuck onto the shelf about a millimeter apart - just like the others. She glanced at the cover of the book that had been hiding the pair: Caroline’s No Nightshade Kitchen: Arthritis Diet. 

The eyes started appearing two weeks ago, when she returned from her annual lake trip with her daughters. The lake tradition began four years ago when she and her husband got divorced. At the start of each summer, she got a blissful school-free week with the girls before their dad took them for the rest of their holidays. The weeks following Lake Week were always the hardest. She needed to build new routines in an empty house, and tackle repair projects before the girls returned to live with her for the school year and wreak chaos in the bathroom and kitchen. 

Luckily work at the library always picked up in the summers as people piled in for free air conditioning and children’s activity programs. After hurting her back last year she only reshelved twice a week. Her first day back from the lake, she had come across an adorable find. Two plastic eyes had been stuck on the shelf under F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. A few hours later, she’d found another set under The Night Climbers of Oxford. Over two weeks she’d found a dozen or so pairs, and the cute joke was starting to feel like littering. 

She finished shelving and sat at the checkout desk with Joanne, who was coloring a poster for the kids’ summer reading program.

“Should we put up a sign asking people not to leave eyes among the stacks? Or will that give others the idea and cause us more grief - I’m pretty sure it’s just one person playing the prank.” 

“Sorry?” Joanne had no idea what she was talking about. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“The plastic eyes that someone’s been leaving around? I only started seeing them once I got back from Lake Chelan but someone keeps sticking them on the shelves.” 

“Mmm…eyes like those craft eyes?”

“Yes! Haven’t you seen them? I’ve found at least one in every section!”

Joanne laughed. “Hey, Charlie!” She called him from the printer room. “Sheila’s been finding eyes all over the shelves! 

Charlie smiled too. “Glass eyes? Or like the letter?” 

“Nah, you know those plastic ones that kids stick on paper plates to make faces?”

“That’s better than the smudges kids leave at knee height. I’m getting too old to crawl around and wipe down the shelves. Correction: we’re all too old. We need to get some young librarians in here.”

Sheila laughed in agreement, but an uneasy feeling came over her. Charlie or Joanne reshelved every day, so between the two of them someone should have noticed. 

Three days later, Joanne dropped a stack of SAT practice books and grimaced as she bent to retrieve them from the carpeted floor. 

“My daughter signed us up for weekly summer pilates classes, even though I’ve never done pilates before. Look at this shit!” Joanne tried clenching her fists, and her hands and forearms trembled. “How am I supposed to stack shelves? I can’t even hold the scanner properly! I’m not going to survive this summer.”

“Do you want to stack on Mondays instead? I can take your Thursdays.” 

Joanne gratefully agreed, and Sheila left her at the checkout counter as she picked up the rest of the SAT books and returned them to the shelves. She wondered if she should also sign up for exercise classes or some weekly activity. With the girls gone, she didn’t have much to do when she got home from work. Last summer she had found the transition from summer lounging to full-time parent especially difficult. She floated through the library, mulling over what she might actually enjoy regularly doing besides reading, when a restlessness pinged. Something was wrong.

She walked among the shelves that she had just restocked to confirm. Nothing. All the eyes had been removed. 

The following Monday, Sheila arrived early and strolled through the shelves. She told herself she was looking for stray books that might have found their way onto the wrong shelf, but she knew Charlie always did a thorough sweep on Sunday nights after the busy weekends. No eyes, plastic or otherwise, lurked between the silent covers. Joanne’s sore limbs had recovered and she hoped to find these plastic googly eyes that Sheila had mentioned maybe too many times. But by the end of the day, she told Sheila the person must have stopped, because there was not an eye in sight. On Wednesday Sheila found 13 pairs of eyes. On Thursday she found 8. 

At the end of the day on Thursday, Sheila gathered the small trash bin under the counter. Over 40 small eyeballs stared at her from among its contents. A thrill of excitement jumped in her stomach. She snapped the plastic bag closed, wrung its neck into a knot, and held it away from her body as she carried it to the outside bins. The parking lot was empty, but she felt the weight of many eyes observing her. 

As a young girl growing up in the quiet suburbs, she had always hoped something magical would happen. She would dream of story tropes that could fit her life if only she kept her eyes open and persisted in discovery. She once checked her birth certificate in case she was secretly adopted - everything seemed in order. She drew extensive maps of the inside layout of Costco, so if an apocalypse hit she could shelter in the warehouse of abundance with her meticulously recorded inventory. 

The years slid by, and nothing supernatural happened. She got a degree from her local university, had a wedding in a hot church with too much makeup sliding down her face, taught middle school English until her girls were born, then became a librarian when they were old enough to catch the bus on their own. Not magical, but not bad either. Life just ticked along, but she had never felt selected for anything, or even had a surprise birthday party. 

These googly eyes were for her. She knew it. Someone had adjusted to her changed shelving schedule, and she needed to know why. There were no notes, just eyes. But one thing held them together - they were always hiding under books about the night.