Checked Out

Donated

Donated:

        The box was sealed shut with clear packaging tape. The kind used for long term deliveries, through different flavors of weather and fourteen types of bumpy roads.

        The teenaged girl aided the package on its invisible wings as she stepped inside. She dropped it on the front counter so that she would not forget to open it later.

        During midday, when the crowds thinned out and the stacks laid low, she took some scissors and sliced through the clear packaging. She had never paid much attention to the careful way that someone wrapped these boxes. But then again, the person who wrapped these boxes never knew she existed.  

        She looked over the books the way she was taught. The names were unfamiliar the way all names were to her. There was not many differences between the authors who wrote these stories and those who decided which ones to share with the public. They were all the same to her. All going to the same place. All in new condition. Not one page out of place. 

        She cataloged the books into the system, where they joined their long awaited ancestors. Each line descending by an order that could only be described as alphabetical.

        Then she made the rounds and found new homes for these soon-to-be-loved characters.

        The slot that had been nothing but half an inch wide stood. Now it was no longer just half an inch of space. For one moment, everything was at peace in that corner of somebody's universe. A place that meant more than a roomful of fallen trees. Each one sacrificed so that a story might live on. It was a gamble, a risk, a chance. Those who survived and those who were meant to be forgotten. That was the way the world worked.

        He remembered the day he proposed. When he stuck the words I love you into a book and let her take it off his shelf. It was only until the end did he realized that everything was different. He had purposely changed the ending so that he could be with her.

        She cried her first word at the ripe age of three.

        She could not have asked for anything better. He could not have asked for a better person to share it with. They looked down at their hands, each conjoined with a part of their daughter. She was their moment. She was theirs and theirs alone.

        Thought she did not have the color of his hair nor the smile of her mother, she was theirs and theirs alone. No amount of paperwork could tell the difference between such tasteless details.

        She would have their love, and she would have their love for books.

        She was their story.

The End

_________

September 2, 2014