The Returns Cart

It is Friday, just past midnight. The library is open all night this week, and the cooling is out. Fans stir the hot air along the stacks, and everyone at the tables wears a wet towel. Over their heads, on fishing line, hang cubes: a small cube inside a large one, the corners joined.

On the returns cart lies a spiral-bound book. Its cover is cut from a cereal box and says GEOMETRON. At the desk a woman in a lanyard that says MINA keeps a lamp lit over one more cube. You put a hand on it. It is cold. She switches the lamp off, and it is warm. She switches the lamp on. It is cold.

You look up at the ones on the line. The kids take them to the wall behind the elementary school, she says. There's an old machinist with a class in the back of the trellis shop, and it's always full. Somebody behind the bus station is taking a shopping cart apart. I haven't been to see that.

You sleep in a chair through the heat of the day and wake with the sun low.