Bold, mid-century pulp aesthetic — saturated colors, grainy texture. In the foreground, a person crouches beside a wall of elaborate cardboard shelving modules, their surface woven with note cards, ticket stubs, and old photographs. One module is slightly ajar, and from the gap spills a faint, ghostly mist. In the background, Austin’s skyline leans under a pale, washed-out sky, with cranes and rooftops sprouting strange cardboard structures like fungal growths. Across the top, in jagged retro font: “A Slow-Burning Mystery of Paper, Breath, and the Songs That Haunt You”.
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The glue smell was in everything now—clothes, hair, coffee mugs. Manny said it meant the city was alive. I said it meant my sinuses were shot. We sat in my kitchen, folding strips of note cards into the new shelf module. The spindler arm squealed a little when I pressed down.
“You ever hear that song—Gray Rock?” Manny said. I told him yeah. The one where the singer sounded like he was talking to a locked door. “Strategy for sanity,” he said, feeding another strip into the slot.
It was too hot to keep the windows closed, so the sounds from South 1st bled in—the rattle of an old bike chain, somebody arguing in Spanish, the slosh of ice in a drink shaker from the taco stand across the street. I lifted the panel and that’s when the library card fell. My name. Next Tuesday.
By the time I looked up, Manny was humming again, that low part of the song that just sits in your head like a weight. I could feel it in my teeth.
That night, lying in bed, the shelf exhaled—slow, like someone waiting for me to answer.
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If you want, I can actually generate the pulp cover art so it looks like a vintage paperback you’d find in a thrift store bin.