The City Library always opened at the same time; and Maisero would always be waiting. He waited on the granite steps, cut into the hill that the Library topped, and looked out at the city; in the mornings, smothered by golden sunlight, it seemed tolerable to him. But only like that.

“Good morning, Maisero,” Natasha, today’s librarian, said. She carried a large golden key around her neck, and stooped forward to unlock the large gate. Maisero pursed his lips and carried himself forward as Natasha held the door for him. No matter how old the librarians would get (although they tended to get younger first), Maisero would always be older. He nodded a silent thank you to her as he passed.

The morning hour was the most comforting time he could find from beyond the high walls of the library. Too late for the poor to terrorize him, too early for the mindless knulls that packed the shelves of this city to burst forward and make their usual commotion. And so he took the morning route this way, at this hour, as he had for the last five decades. The commute home, as the library closed, was an adventure filled with cowardice and fear, but at least he would last. Once in the library, everything was okay.

Maisero sat at a table behind one of the tall bookshelves. He tended to switch sitting location as every project of his ended. He dropped his black briefcase on the table and peeled open its leather flaps, removing from within a pad of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. His one complaint when he had started spending his hours here was that the high-rise windows gave little clarity to his work, but his eyes had adjusted.

He’d invested much of his time in new research for the library: examining flora and fauna on the banks of the waters, collected by other librarians on his behalf; translations of other works in various languages in the library basement. Art, literature, science, all here, all found and rediscovered by Maisero himself—though few, if any, knew his name outside the library walls.

The shore of the city looked back at him now through a small square of glass beside him. The water glinting up at him, almost gleefully. It was terrible to behold. Who would ever want to step onto those docks, or even worse, sail into the neverending expanse? He had interacted with more than a few lousy sailors, and wasn’t ready to take the same position again, not till the day he died.

“Hello Maisero,” one of the library attendants said. She was standing on the other side of the table, with a book held to her chest. She was new to the library, fresh out of one of the nearby universities. “How are you doing today?”

“Fine, fine, all as usual.”

“That’s good. Listen, I know you finished something a few weeks ago, and we got a new shipment of books from overseas just yesterday, so I thought some of them might be a good place to start a new project. I brought one for you in case you were interested.” And with that, she held the volume out to him like an elementary school award. A Study of Fontanus. Maisero grabbed the book, felt shreds of the felt binding rubbing onto his hand.

“Thank you, Delilah, I appreciate your regular recommendations. I’ll—I’ll take a look, I’ll make sure to.”

A flash of a smile appeared. Maisero thought that, even for her, it was a poor attempt.

“Of course. I hope it serves you well.” She nodded to him and returned to her desk, around the corner and past some of the shelves, just in sight from his angle.

Maisero held the book up just a few inches past his nose. The gold letters of the title embossed on the cover were already peeling off, and the cover itself bent too easily in his hands. Better to hide the book away, he thought. It would fall apart in the clumsy, ravaging hands of regular library-goers. Besides, it was of little use to him. Of what diagrams he found flipping through the pages, all seemed to be of different flora, and such fancies were of an older pastime. Better to save the volume for a few generations—let somebody else find a purpose for it. For fontanus.

In the meantime, Maisero could find no words to dig up on the page, and his incessant staring only gave him a headache. A good book, he thought, would relieve some of the tension. Maisero hobbled down one of the aisles, passing through Delilah’s line of sight, and searched for a new title on the spines. Many names had been ground away, but Maisero no longer needed them: he recognized most of the novels on sight. It always hurt his spirit to find pages torn out or loose in a book’s quarters. It would likely never be opened again, and would be given no funeral.

He found more new material at the back. Most of them were novels. Maisero pulled them out from their neighbors, making sure the other books remained in place, and carried his treasure to one of the cushioned seats in the library corners.

And from that seat he passed the day. The books that caught his attention were the most tolerable, and helped spin the wheel of the sun as it turned; but most were deadening. Some pages passed without a memory; other pages took ten minutes and a dozen reads to finish. There was something else on his mind, something in front of him that never appeared. It was no use trying to read while that distraction, whatever it was, hung over his head—but he did it nonetheless.

The light dimmed; people came and went. A few stopped by to drop off books, others came to browse through the collection and take some out. A few hours before the library closed, Delilah walked around through the library with matches and lit the only lamps the library had. All in all, Maisero thought, it had been a quiet day.

Maisero left just before the library closed, slipping into the dark.

The marble steps were barely lit, small balls of light at their sides that barely spanned a few feet. Maisero kept his head down. He knew the way back to his old apartment, but had never looked up to see the path. In the dark, it was too frightening. Never mind the alien shapes of the run-down buildings—he always saw the figures that crept at their underbellies.

The only place worth turning his head up was the water. Maisero couldn’t help but watch the waves move, even for a second, before fear struck his heart and he scurried away.

But this time, something else caused him to stop. A young boy, standing at the cliff and watching the water, his back straight, open to whatever winds blew his way. The boy was raggedy, sure, but there was something else drew his attention to him. The same obnoxious whine from the library, although perhaps a little more pleasant now. Maisero walked towards him.

“Hello, child.”