Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Eugene “Gene” Howard ran the stockroom of the Southern Michigan University bookstore–itself a branch of Beale & Bonn’s Booksellers LLC GmbH–as a second career. His first, as assistant manager for shipping and receiving at the K-Mart in town, had been a casualty of the subprime mortgage crisis, as had been his own subprime mortgage and his 401k. Gene had been left with basically the clothes on his back, the contents of his home in a series of storage lockers, and a mountain of foreclosure debt.

Retirement wasn’t gonna happen. Ever. So Gene took advantage of the fact that he was in relatively good health with logistics experience to get a job that had basic health care, his wife did the same, and they were both crossing their fingers to run out the clock without a catastrophe. Their daughter, Marley, was already in college working on accumulating her own pile of debt, so that left the B&B stockroom and the fact that Gene could work weekends for time and a half.

He didn’t resent it–far from it, in fact. Moving would have been even more ruinously expensive, and B&B had saved his finances after a humbling six months working openings at McDonald’s and closings at Walmart. Still, the drudgery of the work took its toll on him. Gene had relished the unpredictability of freight shipments at K-Mart, the thousand tiny crises that made each day different from the last. B&B was, by contrast, entirely to predictable. The freight arrived every day, like clockwork, and was all the same size. There were no surprises, and in the rare event that he met a customer, there was little he could do for them.

So Gene took his pleasure where he could get it, and that was in remainders.

B&B remaindered both textbooks and its trade books, usually when new editions came out. Gene’s job was to strip the books by tearing their covers off and then discarding the text block. His predecessor had set the “stripped” books out in the break room for people to take home, but Gene believed in the letter of the law, and those books went in the dumpster. Sure, some people whined about it–Gene’s part-time assistant, for one, was always on about saving the books. Gene responded that he was welcome to pick them out of the dumpster.

But the sordid fact of the matter was that Gene enjoyed the act of stripping and throwing the books away. The crack of spines, the snap of bindings, the way the books arced through the air when he hucked them at the dumpster which lay just off the loading dock…that was where Gene found a not insubstantial part of his joy. Who cared about what was in the books? Not like they were limited editions. No, they found their ultimate and only purposes as dissections, as missiles, as one of the only things that brightened Gene’s ditchwater-dull days.

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“Well, best as we can tell, the decedent is one James Lee, owner and CEO of TruTrail Navigational Products LLC GmbH,” said Wells, her eyes flicking between her phone and the man’s license.”

“Techbro,” Turner said, his contempt evident even behind the mirrored shades he preferred as sheriff. “What can you tell me about TruTrail?”

“Well, according to their social media,” Wells read, “TruTrail, and I quote, ‘seamlessly integrates cutting-edge AI-driven technologies to revolutionize spatial intelligence, optimizing dynamic routes with precision, and fostering a paradigm shift in personalized navigation experiences for the modern era.’ It is accompanied with a picture of a man in a jeep looking at a screen.”

“That’s a lot of words all right,” said Rodriguez. “Fancy ones too. Hang ’em in the front window and watch the young ladies wear ’em to the cotillion.”

“Yes, but what does it mean?” said Turner.

“It looks like they were a GPS company,” Wells replied. “They were working on a new GPS system, which I expect is the unknown widget that we found, in pieces, complicating the identification of the decedent through facial trauma.”

“I guess it didn’t work very well,” Rodriguez chuckled. “Our witness there in the picnic area on the bluffs said that our man drove onto the logging road and then straight off the cliff. Remind me to check my immediate family members for any TruTrail units.”

“You don’t suppose…” Turner said, looking down at the wreckage 375 feet below. “Nah.”

“Suppose what, Sheriff?” said Wells. “You know we’re all about supposing, especially when this is the goriest case we’ve seen since the knife salesman got run off the road.”

“Yeah, suppose what?” Rodriguez echoed. “Don’t sit on it, Bill.”

“That gobbledygook you read said it was AI-powered,” mused Sheriff Turner. “What if it killed its creator and made things look like an accident?”

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A holiday tree glistens closely
Lighted garlands are hung up nearby
Live pine boughs all sag with baubles
The lights mimic stars in the sky

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English they said
Is not a
Language
Merely three
Dialects
In
A
Trenchcoat
I, accepting this
Said in response
I think you are
Right about
The trenchcoat
But really
It’s more
Like
Ten
Dialects
And also some
Of them
Are
Eating
Each
Other

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A kettle of eight vultures rising, circling in the morning sun
They bank and swoop over the roof of the anthropology department
Where the vault of plundered skeletons lies
The vultures wheel and turn for minutes on end, as if to say
Give us the old bones
Give them to us, that we might crack them open
Give them to us that we might feast on ancient marrow
Give them to us so that, through our repast, they might return to the land of their ancestors
Give them to us so they might grow life anew
The building, impassive, does not respond
But the birds will rise again the next morn
Their unspoken demand still on the wind, gliding silently on a rising thermal

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An underground railroad for books
All information wants to be free
Smuggling tomes may not be the same
But it sure feels that way to me

If keeping a book from the dumpster
Is a cause noble and true
I’ve broken my back for it lately
Can the same be said about you?

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“Why do they call it the Sleepless Labyrinth, Codswallop?” Rags asked.

“It is intentionally designed to weary the traveler, to lull them to sleep, and then the labyrinth births whatever they dream of,” said the butler, his eyes steely beneath his bowler. “None quite know why. I’ve heard many theories, but we oughtn’t linger here to hear them.”

“Give me the short version then,” said Rags. “So we won’t.”

“Well, some say that the Labyringth was built by a sleepwalking man to bring dreams into the real world, which they have long-desired, as anyone well-versed in the matter must know,” Codswallop said. “Others say that it was intended as a diabolical trap to impede movement across the Lands Betwixt.”

“Two theories isn’t many, Cod.”

“Very well, young master,” Codswallop said. “One more, as a treat: it is said that the Labyrinth has, at its center, a great prize, and that the dreams its conjures are a most intricate and devilish defense thereof.”

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In thirteen days so far this month
It’s been my fate to see
A thousand thousand worries
Bound to bedevil me

Terror of dictators yet to come
The shock of getting old
Bitter warming of the earth
When it should be growing cold

In my mind I know it well
I’m powerless to affect
Any of these looming hells
That I can now detect

These worries may not be too real
They may not be justified
Still I sit here, tightly feel
As though I’m soon to die

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American Mk. 22 ABWS
The Mark 22 Anti-Beatnik Weapon System was a .5 kiloton tactical airburst weapon designed to be dropped on soft targets, though a stray comment by a Department of Defense official about dropping it on beatniks eventually stuck. Never deployed, as the casing developed problems with existing bomb racks that led to stickage.

French AN-32 Cygnus culinary weapon
The AN-32 was designed to simplify military logistics by using a small, “clean” fission detonation to cook thousands of military meals at once. Considered for deployment in a number of conflicts from Vietnam to Algeria, it was ultimately withdrawn after test meals were rendered “unpalatably rubbery” by the French Culinary Corps.

British Green Grocer WE.77 thermal unit
Developed after the intensely cold winter of 1978-79 by the Thatcher administration, the Green Grocer WE.77 was designed to melt large quantities of snow with thermal shock. While tests in the high Canadian arctic were promising, the inability to keep fission products out of meltwater led to its abandonment.

Soviet RDS-4242 propulsion bomblet
Tested off Vladivostok in the mid-1970s, the RDS-4242 was designed as an emergency propulsion system for stranded or disabled Soviet ships. Using a steam catapult and a series of atomic bomblets, the ships could in theory use controlled explosions to navigate. Unfortunately, the catapult worked less well than the bomblets, and sank the freighter Komsomolets in testing with high military officials aboard.

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