After the Flood, the Reading Room

At dawn we wheel damp atlases into the sun, their continents lifting like startled fish scales. The windows breathe salt back into the street, and every table glitters with patient towels.

We separate pages with bone folders and prayer, ink loosening into blue weather around our thumbs. A child’s library card, found in a swollen novel, dries beside a row of borrowed constellations.

By noon the fans keep time like soft percussion, leaf after leaf relearns its private rustle. Mildew retreats to the corners, muttering, while titles rise, spine-first, from their sleep.

At closing, the room smells of rain and cedar. We switch off lamps, but the shelves stay luminous, as if each rescued sentence held a small ember and the night had come here to read by it.