Issue No. 8, Libraries - Vanity and the Photograph

A child comes of age in the public library when the top of his head is flush with the top of the librarian’s desk; that is to say, flush with the tips of her miserable nipples. The sign on the desk doesn’t put it that way, but words are things closely watched in the library while shapes are generally ignored.

One child not yet of age approached the desk of his public library and removed from his inner coat pocket a folded leaf of eight-by-ten Ilford. He placed it on the desk. “Yes?” the librarian said, keeping her hands crossed next to the paper and her eyes stooped towards the child. But he only looked up at her, without expression. She pried the paper apart, whereupon she saw a young girl, a nude, her back to the camera and bent over an older man. He, also nude, knelt below the young girl, each of his fingers encased in a stick of unsalted butter. The librarian opened her mouth and shut up her throat, pushing one small, pitiable breath. She looked back to the child. He was wiggling into his mittens and halfway out the door.

Later that day, the librarian recognized the child as a boy she had eavesdropped on not a week earlier, a boy she then scolded for using the Lord’s name in vain.