Mallory Leininger
The last little library, located in Little Rock, Arkansas, overlooks a small, cracked blacktop parking lot. The few, yellow-painted parking lines faded from the sun and interrupted by potholes the size of moon craters. Wispy vines grow up the side of the quaint brick building and onto the A-Frame roof, making their way under the shingles. Red paint is flaking off the crooked windowsills that frame foggy windows, and the door sits on rusted, once brass-colored hinges that creak in protest when disturbed.
The area around the last little library has been overtaken by its surroundings. A creek trickles behind the run down building an arms-length away, where the crickets sing and the frogs croak. A few steppingstones are placed to cross the creek, left by an adventurer from eons ago and leads to an overgrown desire-path that was much more defined a lifetime ago than it is now, spotted with moss and stubborn weeds. The trees in the area, magnificent oaks and maples and hickories have grown tall, taller than anyone could imagine, without the careful, meticulous pruning that the dwellers of Little Rock once took to curb it. The fruit trees, humble plums and rambunctious cherries, drop their fruit on the ground, and the animals skitter off with the fallen gems without appreciating the tree’s thoughtfulness to share.
The tree’s roots have grown into each other, twisting and merging, unable to distinguish where one tree ends and another begins. They tangle together like intertwined hands, warm and loving, and growing in tandem with each other—supportive. The roots budge into and crack the foundation of the last little library, but no one takes notice.
Tallgrasses—big bluestem and switchgrass and Indiangrass—provide shelter for the limbless and the small and conceal what once was the entrance to the little library—the last one—in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Still, the lone librarian wakes with the sun at five am, prepares herself a bowl of plain, unsweetened oatmeal, dresses for the day, and curls her thin, white hair. She remembers to grab her cheaters on the way out the door, slipping them around her neck as they sit on a beaded chain.
The librarian walks the few blocks to the library and listens to the birds chirp and the caterwauling of the cicadas as they start to wake with the day’s growing heat. The sidewalks are barren, no one to share them with, sun bleached and crumbling. She is very careful not to trip and fall since no one would be around to help her if she’d broken her hip on the way down.
Her quiet steps lead her to the library. She knows she’s made it when she spots the small, unobtrusive cairn she had stacked herself, when she first realized how things were going. The grass parts, a stage curtain, as she slips into the foliage and follows the flattened grass path she’s unintentionally carved herself, leading to the jagged railing to the library’s door.
The library is never locked—there’s no need, and the librarian simply opens the door with a firm shove, and she swats at the dust that rains on her head.
She trots to the checkout desk and checks the returns collection bin. There’s no incoming material, as usual. Still, she sits at the counter and prepares the new books for shelving. There’s only two, this year. Both about clock and watch repair.
She takes a book off the oversized, vastly vacant cart, and removes the dustjacket. She thinks it’s nice she was given a hardcover, this year. The paperbacks are much harder to prepare, in her opinion. She swivels in her chair to face the lamination press and covers the dustjacket in a thin layer of laminate, for it’s protection. Swiveling back to the desk, she opens the top drawer for the thick tape, distinctly different to the thin tape, and tapes the dustjacket to the book to keep them bound as one; she doesn’t want them to get separated and lost, as so many have before them.
In the second drawer down to her left, she gently picks a return card and sleeve from its neat, nearly full box with her thumb and index nails, which she keeps longer than her others for this express purpose. She peels the backing off of the card sleeve to expose the adhesive and sticks it to the inside of the book cover. Careful not to bend it, the blank return card is slotted into the sleeve, and left to eternally wait for it’s first borrower. The librarian brands the book with the old “property of” stamp, the ink faded. She closes the book with a soft, self-satisfied smile and switches it out on the desolate cart with the other new arrival—also a hardcover, to her pleasant surprise—and starts the process back over again.
With the books prepared, she carts the books over to the 600’s section and nestles the books between a book about Shetland waist knitting and a farrier’s manual.
Satisfied, she returns to her desk and sits, waiting for a patron. And all day, she will sit, waiting, until the clock hits five in the evening.
The library—little and the last—sits stagnant. Only an old wooden ceiling fan makes any noise. The books sit neatly on their shelves, silently, unable to beg to be opened, and collect thicker layers of dust. The library moans, occasionally, like a call for visitors, even if the logical explanation is the wasting foundation.
The history section in the back right of the library has sat unused for a handful of decades, no one perusing the shelves for women’s history as it once had, books being pulled from the shelves by the dozens to be piled for further examination on the generic table directly to the right of the scant shelves.
The alcove archived magazines, newspapers, and town histories has gone unentered for longer, with no content to be added. Unfortunate, since the alcove gets the best sunlight, soft streams of light spreading over the tables like a spotlight as it sneaks through the windows.
Downstairs, the children’s books have all but been forgotten.
Yet the Librarian, with her short stature and calm demeanor, sits at the desk with her hands clasped, glasses around her neck, with a smile on her face as she waits patiently.
She knows that, yes, no one will visit. There is no one to visit.
Because in Little Rock, Arkansas, she is the lone resident. Still, she remains optimistic that someone will pass through town, eventually.
She knows that there are others out there—there must be—as new books show up on the cart next to her desk annually from who-knows-where, and that means that someone will eventually visit.
And the librarian smiles as she goes to bed with the moon, excited to get back to the library in the morning.