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“There Weren’t Any Librarians over by the Drop Box”

I was walking around the library again, with apparent directionlessness. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but rather that there was nothing on the premises I didn’t want to do. I even liked looking out the window and at the fish tank in the kids’ section.

Something brought me over to the return counter and I returned the book in the drop box. The lady working behind the counter observed that I got to the counter before I left the drop box.

“You’re here before you left over there,” she remarked to me.

“Yup,” I replied. “I guess so.”

“Do you always do that, be two places at once, corporeally, as a way of reflecting the frenetic mania with which you walk around these premises?” she asked.

“Yup,” I said. “Pretty much.”

“Do you have any other superpowers?” she asked.

“Not that I can think of off the top of my head,” I answered.

“Do you have any capabilities whatsoever?” she then asked.

“It’s possible.”

“Are you even capable,” she then persisted, in interrogative, “of THAT, in a true sense?”

“Of what?” I asked.

“You know,” she said, kind of making a weird gesture with that hat.

My constitution felt flagged. With great ardor, I muscled out a shrug, as if unsure. All the things I wanted to do around the library were morphing and shifting in and out of themselves, as if suspended in a state of translucent ephemerality, hence theoretically adding to their appeal, but you usually have to sift a bit, no matter where you are, and where you are.

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