Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The director of the Mississippi Delta Doombrary has retired, nearly 60 years after dying at his post. “While we have enjoyed our director’s tireless efforts, literally tireless since the undead sleep not nor tire, he has decided to retire to spend more time in his grave and visiting his great-great-grandchildren as an apparition in a mirror,” the Doombrary said in a statement.

The University of Northern Mississippi is hiring for a Defense Against the Dark Arts librarian. “We’ve had an awful lot of trouble keeping this position filled,” said the Dean of Libraries. “We never seem to have any new hire last longer than one year.”

Requirements for the position include an MLIS, at least two years’ experience in a library, three letters of recommendation, and a blood sigil that is binding in states bordering on Mississippi.

The Yoknapatawpha County Public Library is holding its first annual public book burning on May 1. Anyone with a tome that is on the Black List that has been posted in local newspapers and in social media is welcome to attend the event, which is dedicated to General Secretary Joseph Stalin. While the book burning is an optional family fun event, with weenie roasts and s’mores for the children, the Yoknapatawpha County Public Library does remind all participants that possession of a title on the Black List after May 2 will carry the punishment of penal transportation to a local gulag for a period of not less than 20 years.

The Sparrow and Squirrel Bookmobile had its inaugural run in March, doing its pest to spread literacy and love of reading to the wildlife of the state. For a list of scheduled visits, see the official bookmobile tracker app available from the sponsoring library.

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When it was all over, when the last screams died down, the Karkovsky Bros. Bear Circus had been liberated. The bears now rode their unicycles and wore their costumes for no master, as every last carnie had been mauled to death. As the revolution had occurred just after the tents had been pitched but just before posters went up in town, the locals left the rebellious ursids to their own devices, ignorant of their presence.

But all was not well within the circus now that the worker bears had risen up and seized the means of production. As they rode their unicycles and performed tricks for their own amusement, the bears well remembered the sting of the whip and the claustrophobia of the cage. The ringmaster loomed large over them even in death, and the bears took steps to placate him lest he return to take up the whip once more.

This is why wise travelers will give the old Karkovsky Bros. tent a wide berth. The bears will seize unwary travelers and smear them with greasepaint, dressing them as clowns before sacrificing them before the ringmaster. Mouldering in his throne where he was slain, the ringmaster is still feared enough by the bears that they make him regular offerings lest he return.

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Everyone knows that when you have mail, the postman raises the little flag on your mailbox. When there’s no mail, the flag is horizontal.

But what about when the flag is really lowered, vertical but in the inverse of its “you’ve got mail” position?

Most people would assume that means the mailbox is broken. But nothing could be further from the truth! It simply means that you have nega-mail. And, as alarming as it sounds, nega-mail is nothing to be worried about as long as you take the proper precautions.

First and most importantly, you must not let nega-mail and ordinary mail (or posi-mail) come into contact under any circumstances. They will annihilate each other in a flash of smoke and postal adhesives. Some people advocate disposing of nega-mail by sacrificing posi-mail of little value (like advertising circulars or old newspapers), but this is highly dangerous as the annihilation can leave harmful postal residues and will temporarily affect the postal rates of nearby areas. Unfortunates have been invoiced for postal rates anywhere from 5% to 500% of normal as a result of such careless disposal.

Second, nega-mail does in fact demand a response. It is sent by someone who desires a piece of posi-postage in return, after all, and the cost of a negi-stamp is usually equal to the postage for a corresponding reply, leaving the operation at a net cost of $0 to the postal customer. So while you must be very careful not to let the two touch, posi-mail is the only possible response to nega-mail.

What should your response be? Carefully read the nega-mail to find out. Usually the construction will give you a clue as to what sort of response is expected. For instance, a nega-letter reading “Thank you so much for not telling me about your trip to Socotra” would be an obvious indication that a letter about your trip is an appropriate response.

Once a piece of posi-mail that is the opposite of the nega-mail you recieved is sent, the nega-mail will disappear naturally. You may give the letter to a postal worker when they come by, or a nega-post worker when they do not come by. Replies may be mailed at the post office and not mailed at the nega-post office, as well.

Tune in next week for the first in a series of how to write a nega-letter or send a nega-package, starting with the most pressing difficulties most people face: finding antimatter without a particle accelerator, and how much money not to bring when you don’t go to the nega-post office.

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The strange diminishing of honeybees in the summertime, desperate measures were called for. Apiaries throughout the USA were willing to pay top dollar for live bees, especially vital queens and viable sections of comb. Most wound up coming from India, where the beekeeping practices might not have been up to snuff but the bugs were cheap and plentiful.

That’s where I come in. Bees, live bees especially, are considered to be dangerous animals. They need to be escorted by a courier at every step of the way. That doesn’t necessarily mean cuddling up to them, but you have to keep the box in sight.

I boarded Eastern Airlines Flight 887 from Delhi to London with the courier case, all wrapped in bright orange quarantine tape, bumping against my leg as I limped to my seat and stowed my cane.

“Did you need a hand, hun?” a stewardess said.

“What I need is a leg,” I joked. “I’ve tried everything from surgery to magnets, but it still gimps out on me.”

“You were injured by…magnets?”

I set the case of bees down on the seat I’d bought for it–the profit was more than enough to pay for their own seat. “I took an arrow to the knee,” I said.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, clearly getting neither that joke or its predecessor.

“It was a work accident,” I said, deciding to level with the lady who’d be bringing me my booze over the course of the next sixteen hours. “The bees got out once, and I’m allergic.”

What can I say? I like to live on the edge.

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“Rise, my friends,” said Richard, in a gracious tone, looking on them with a countenance in which his habitual good-humour had already conquered the blaze of hasty resentment, and whose features retained no mark of the late desperate conflict, excepting the flush arising from exertion,—”Arise,” he said, “my friends!—Your misdemeanours, whether in forest or field, have been atoned by the loyal services you rendered my distressed subjects before the walls of Torquilstone, and the rescue you have this day afforded to your sovereign. Arise, my liegemen, and be good subjects in future.—And thou, brave Locksley—”

“Call me no longer Locksley, my Liege, but know me under the name, which, I fear, fame hath blown too widely not to have reached even your royal ears—I am Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest.” 561

“King of Outlaws, and Prince of good fellows!” said the King, “who hath not heard a name that has been borne as far as Palestine? But be assured, brave Outlaw, that no deed done in our absence, and in the turbulent times to which it hath given rise, shall be remembered to thy disadvantage.”

“True says the proverb,” said Wamba, interposing his word, but with some abatement of his usual petulance,—

“‘When the cat is away, The mice will play.'”

“What, Wamba, art thou there?” said Richard; “I have been so long of hearing thy voice, I thought thou hadst taken flight.”

“I take flight!” said Wamba; “when do you ever find Folly separated from Valour? There lies the trophy of my sword, that good grey gelding, whom I heartily wish upon his legs again, conditioning his master lay there houghed in his place. It is true, I gave a little ground at first, for a motley jacket does not brook lance-heads, as a steel doublet will. But if I fought not at sword’s point, you will grant me that I sounded the onset.”

“And to good purpose, honest Wamba,” replied the King. “Thy good service shall not be forgotten.”

“‘Confiteor! Confiteor!'”—exclaimed, in a submissive tone, a voice near the King’s side—”my Latin will carry me no farther—but I confess my deadly treason, and pray leave to have absolution before I am led to execution!”

Richard looked around, and beheld the jovial Friar on his knees, telling his rosary, while his quarter-staff, which had not been idle during the skirmish, lay on the grass beside him. His countenance was gathered so as he thought might best express the most profound contrition, his eyes being turned up, and the corners of his mouth drawn down, as Wamba expressed it, like the tassels at the mouth of a purse. Yet this demure affectation of extreme penitence was whimsically belied by a ludicrous meaning which lurked in his huge features, and seemed to pronounce his fear and repentance alike hypocritical.

“For what art thou cast down, mad Priest?” said Richard; “art thou afraid thy diocesan should learn how truly thou dost serve Our Lady and Saint Dunstan?—Tush, man! fear it not; Richard of England betrays no secrets that pass over the flagon.”

“Nay, most gracious sovereign,” answered the Hermit, (well known to the curious in penny-histories of Robin Hood, by the name of Friar Tuck,) “it is not the crosier I fear, but the sceptre.—Alas! that my sacrilegious fist should ever have been applied to the ear of the Lord’s anointed!”

“Ha! ha!” said Richard, “sits the wind there?—In truth I had forgotten the buffet, though mine ear sung after it for a whole day. But if the cuff was fairly given, I will be judged by the good men around, if it was not as well repaid—or, if thou thinkest I still owe thee aught, and will stand forth for another counterbuff—”

“By no means,” replied Friar Tuck, “I had mine own returned, and with usury—may your Majesty ever pay your debts as fully!”

“If I could do so with cuffs,” said the King, “my creditors should have little reason to complain of an empty exchequer.”

“And yet,” said the Friar, resuming his demure hypocritical countenance, “I know not what penance I ought to perform for that most sacrilegious blow!—-”

“Speak no more of it, brother,” said the King; “after having stood so many cuffs from Paynims and misbelievers, I were void of reason to quarrel with the buffet of a clerk so holy as he of Copmanhurst. Yet, mine honest Friar, I think it would be best both for the church and thyself, that I should procure a license to unfrock thee, and retain thee as a yeoman of our guard, serving in care of our person, as formerly in attendance upon the altar of Saint Dunstan.”

“My Liege,” said the Friar, “I humbly crave your pardon; and you would readily grant my excuse, did you but know how the sin of laziness has beset me. Saint Dunstan—may he be gracious to us!—stands quiet in his niche, though I should forget my orisons in killing a fat buck—I stay out of my cell sometimes a night, doing I wot not what—Saint Dunstan never complains—a quiet master he is, and a peaceful, as ever was made of wood.—But to be a yeoman in attendance on my sovereign the King—the honour is great, doubtless—yet, if I were but to step aside to comfort a widow in one corner, or to kill a deer in another, it would be, ‘where is the dog Priest?’ says one. ‘Who has seen the accursed Tuck?’ says another. ‘The unfrocked villain destroys more venison than half the country besides,’ says one keeper; ‘And is hunting after every shy doe in the country!’ quoth a second.—In fine, good my Liege, I pray you to leave me as you found me; or, if in aught you desire to extend your benevolence to me, that I may be considered as the poor Clerk of Saint Dunstan’s cell in Copmanhurst, to whom any small donation will be most thankfully acceptable.”

“I understand thee,” said the King, “and the Holy Clerk shall have a grant of vert and venison in my woods of Warncliffe. Mark, however, I will but assign thee three bucks every season; but if that do not prove an apology for thy slaying thirty, I am no Christian knight nor true king.”

“Your Grace may be well assured,” said the Friar, “that, with the grace of Saint Dunstan, I shall find the way of multiplying your most bounteous gift.”

“I nothing doubt it, good brother,” said the King; “and as venison is but dry food, our cellarer shall have orders to deliver to thee a butt of sack, a runlet of Malvoisie, and three hogsheads of ale of the first strike, yearly—If that will not quench thy thirst, thou must come to court, and become acquainted with my butler.”

“But for Saint Dunstan?” said the Friar—

“A cope, a stole, and an altar-cloth shalt thou also have,” continued the King, crossing himself—”But we may not turn our game into earnest, lest God punish us for thinking more on our follies than on his honour and worship.”

“I will answer for my patron,” said the Priest, joyously.

“Answer for thyself, Friar,” said King Richard, something sternly; but immediately stretching out his hand to the Hermit, the latter, somewhat abashed, bent his knee, and saluted it. “Thou dost less honour to my extended palm than to my clenched fist,” said the Monarch; “thou didst only kneel to the one, and to the other didst prostrate thyself.”

But the Friar, afraid perhaps of again giving offence by continuing the conversation in too jocose a style—a false step to be particularly guarded against by those who converse with monarchs—bowed profoundly, and fell into the rear.

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The saddest thing about houses, I think, is that they can’t tell when someone is dead. They blithely support all the crumpled prescription slips on the countertop as if the deceased will be back any minute, lovingly maintain full laundry hampers that will never be emptied. Only dust makes it clear, in time, that they are empty for good.

I’d resolved that wasn’t going to happen to Dad’s place.

He’d lived alone for years, stubbornly alone, insisting on doing what he could do on his own and cutting out the rest. “The rest” had mostly meant me and Mom, though with her in the home for Alzheimers I suppose he could be forgiven. He could barely take care of himself at the end, much less anyone else. We hadn’t spoken in months, nearly a year.

About a week after the service, and two weeks after they’d found him slumped over on a park bench, I first broached the house to try and see about getting it cleaned out. There wasn’t any nostalgia on my part, since Dad hadn’t lived in the house I grew up in for years, but in many ways that made it worse. The place was all Dad and only Dad to me, every mote of dust suffused with his presence.

Wandering through the garage, I saw that his tools were still laid out on the workbench. I don’t know tools; he might have been tinkering with an automobile part that sat there in a greasy puddle, or maybe on the wood carvings he’d occasionally whittled away at.

Maybe they’d just been out to be out, to have something to look at and work with. It couldn’t have been easy with his arthritic fingers, but organizing tools had always been one of Dad’s great joys.

The kitchen carried that theme of organization that had been Dad as long as I could remember. Prescriptions laid out crumpled but neat in the order they expired, lists of chores that he was still able to do at 85, and of course the big stained whiteboard calendar that had been his weekly schedule as far back as I could remember. I’d always hated it, hated the way it had filled up with soccer and softball, and I’d caught hell a few times erasing events I didn’t care to attend as a kid back in the old house.

Only one event was on the calendar for that month, written in over the ghosts of a hundred others on the day Dad had died. “THURSDAY 3/31: CALL SON.”

I recoiled a bit at that, stumbling backwards and groping for purchase against the shock.

Dad didn’t have any sons. I was his only daughter.

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Thickets of tiny wildflowers dappled like snow against the verdant grass that met the sky at the horizon.

I awoke there in times of great stress, great hardship, great danger. Fourteen times, more or less, wandering under a warm late-afternoon sun that never shifted in the sky amid scents that never seemed to dim.

The shade usually appears in the distance, as indistinct as a watercolor. She draws away from me when I approach, her path musical with gentle laughter, and I am only able to catch up to her through trickery.

This time, I doubled back in a series of narrowing concentric circles to approach her figure, as indistinct up close as it was from afar.

“Where is this place,” I asked, “and who are you?”

“It is a place of safety from which to confront a hostile world, cared-for and loved by the only one who ever did the same for you.”

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“Don’t you see? It’s blocks all the way down. We’re built from molecules, and molecules from atoms, and atoms from quarks. Building blocks upon building blocks, all in tune with the rhythm and pulse of the universe. To build is essential, it is to partake in the universal engines of creation and light.”

“Be that as it may, you’re still not getting that 2000-piece, $299.99 Lego set.”

“But Mom! I NEED it!”

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In the old days, when the world was but young and the creatures were but new upon it, a sparrow approached its young mother, the Earth below, with a request.

“Mother,” it said most politely, “I have a boon to ask of thee.”

“Speak, then, little flutterer,” said the Earth. In those days, young and so very proud of her creations, she whispered lovingly to all of them in the dewey mornings and misty evenings. The stony silence she bears now is, after all, borne of the long hurt that only a mother can know, and not of hatred.

“I would like to know why it is that I must die,” the sparrow said.

“Many have asked me this before, and it has ever been a prelude to asking eternal life of me,” answered the Earth.

“I would be lying, dear Mother, if I said it were not so,” said the sparrow. “But Father ever gives off warmth and light, seemingly asking nothing in return, while thine gifts are only good for a time, until we inevitably return them to thee.”

“And yet has your Father in the sky ever held thee, ever whispered to thee, ever provided hollows in which to hide and sticks with which to build?” asked the Earth. “I think not. His gifts are fine and without recompense, but they are the gifts of an absent parent, sent instead of love rather than with love, by one who is too busy flitting and dancing for real responsibility.”

“But I also flit and dance after a fashion, dear Mother,” said the sparrow. “Surely thou can part with what it would take to show me the same regard that Father does.”

This greatly saddened the Earth. “I will make you a bargain then, sparrow. I will hold myself apart from thee and take thee not into my bosom in death. We shall see, then how much regard I show for three.”

The sparrow eagerly agreed, and that very night he sprang from the jaws of one who would otherwise have slain him. But soon he came to see he folly of his request: in holding herself apart from him, the Earth offered neither shelter nor succor. Perches and nests failed to warm, food failed to satisfy, water failed to slake thirst.

Worse, the sparrow came to see how its mate, its chicks, and all of its flock in time came to rest in the embrace of their loving mother. The sparrow was soon cut off from family and flock, regarded as a curious old outsider even by his own descendants.

After the passage of much time, the sparrow returned to his mother. “O mother, I beg of thee, take back this gift which has been my curse,” he wept. “I see now what you meant all those many years ago.”

“Do you now, little flutterer?” The Earth was much saddened in those later days, and already beginning to withdraw herself from her beloved children into solitude. “What would you ask of me now? What impossible and selfish demands?”

“I ask only to return that which I once borrowed from thee and, in my impudence, sought to keep,” said the sparrow. “I can hear the keening call of the Great Flock, and wish only to be reunited with them.”

“You see now what your pride has wrought?” said the Earth.

“I do.”

“Then embrace me, O flutterer.”

That was the last time a sparrow ever spoke to the Earth, our mother, and the last request she granted unto us. And yet we remain grateful all the same, for without her daily gifts, we would perish. And without returning to her in time, we would not have repaid all that we owe.

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Later historians contend that the reason for the Eastern Republic’s stunning defeat at the hands of the Western Empire can be attributed directly to a cultural malaise that afflicted the multitudinous citizens of the polyglot Republic. In the 200 years before its annihilation, the Eastern Republic had gradually withdrawn official recognition of most religious and cultural groups, instead pressing them to amalgamate into the Organization for Universal Life, otherwise known as OFUL. The idea, promoted by seven Prime Ministers in succession, was that the only way to ensure unity amid the staggering diversity of peoples, cultures, and faiths that had come under the Republic’s rule after the end of the Resource Wars was to amalgamate everything into a single whole. If every citizen attended the same church, the same social group, the same civil society, surely unity would follow.

In practice, the doctrine of the OFUL was so diffuse as to be practically nonexistent. Its tenets simply affirmed the belief that life was a good thing and that people should be happy, while encouraging the perusal of whatever members wished. The dissolution of all other organizations in the Republic, intended to give teeth to the various provisions of unity, simply meant that most organizations which had existed before were reconstituted inside the OFUL in secret. Rather than the unity that they had hoped for, the Prime Ministers had created a force of disunity, incapable of exciting passion among its adherents and so watered-down in its tenets that the only ones in its ranks that were true believers were clandestine members of suppressed groups. The only response to diversity was uncertainty of belief, OFUL claimed, and the result was that many believed in nothing at all.

The Western Empire also espoused a state religion, but its embrace of the Cult of the Sages was uncompromising. All citizens who were not part of the Cult were denied the right to participate in civil society and subject to official harassment, confiscation of property, and even state-sponsored murder. The Seven Sages and their collected writings, the Codex Sagax, were considered inviolate and universal truths, applicable to any and all situations. Though there was dissent in the Empire, it was mostly in the form of inter-ethnic conflicts and struggles between different interpretations of the Codex. On the basic truths espoused therein, there was unanimous certainty and support; those who did not cleave to the Codex were so thoroughly terrorized by violence and official repression that they were paralyzed into inaction.

In other words, history often paints the triumph of the Western Empire over the Eastern Republic as one of certainty over doubt, conformity enforced by brutality over milquetoast polygoltism. It’s not a universally-held view, nor is it without its accusations of bias and even various -isms. But it remains the most popular explanation of how the technologically, numerically, and militarily superior forces of the Republic were utterly defeated in a whirlwind 4-month campaign.

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