A Fantasy short story by I.M. Gerhi
Some books belong to people. Others refuse to be owned.
For years, the narrator of The Paradeda Library has possessed a strange gift: the ability to sense which book belongs to which person. Without reading a single word, he has spent his life reuniting books with their destined owners. But when he stumbles upon The Book, everything changes.
Unlike any book before it, The Book cannot be given away. It clings to him, disrupting his mission, haunting his every moment.
At the moment The Paradeda Library is only available as part of the short story collection Night Light Tales.
Read a sample:
You can find them bloody anywhere. Charity stores, car-boot sales, recycling plants, honesty libraries, any lost and found. There were almost no place where I could not pick up a book or twelve. To think there was a time when books were a special rarity, or very expensive status symbols, bound in leather and lined on solid oak shelves.
The old rich farts might have also known that a layer of books lining the walls provided good insulation. Not that my walls resembled a snooty private library. It was simply where I lived—whether in a basement, a shack, or a bachelor flat.
I worked on the basic principle of two in and one out. It required several streams of activity to maintain, because my ‘in’ mostly tended to outpace my ‘out’ by several orders of magnitude. In reality, it was more like ten in and one out.
That was until I found The Book. For the next couple of months, my ratio dropped practically to zero, both on books in and out.
After almost twenty years of acquisition, it was impossible to drop down to completely zero. It was as if I had honed a book hunter’s skill. Or maybe I had developed some kind of book magnetism that attracted them to me. I found them at bus stops or in dustbins that suddenly ‘spoke to me.’ It was getting rid of them again that took some effort.
The Book made a mockery of my efforts.
With thousands of books in my life, there was some kind of anonymity in each individual book.
…end of sample
The Paradeda Library © I.M. Gerhi