Tag: dread

The Keeper (pt10)

The sound of the passageway being accessed caused as much heart failure as it did anything else. Even while knowing the sound would be different if it was someone the Librarian hadn’t let in himself, the sound always made me panic. If for some reason someone came in who might let the regime know what lay down here… I wondered if the old man thought that about me – some child who showed up here so often. Did he think I was trustworthy?

Were all of us waiting for the other to break?

I recognized the woman who entered. She had the odd habit of touching her forehead in greeting, even if she didn’t say a word to the person. I watched as she went through the motions toward the old man, myself and the Keeper. I instinctively returned the gesture, as if that was how one was to respond.

The Keeper merely waved her over. “I found the volume you were looking for.”

The young woman joined us.

Making sense is dumb

Some days, the idea of work – the act of trading life for money – is so unbearably foreign that she can’t help but hit the snooze alarm one more time.

“Yo, sis.”

The blankets were removed from her. Her roommate was the worst. With a groan, she pulled her pillow over her head. “I don’t want to be in this economic system,” she said, voice muffled somewhere under it all.

Her roommate snorted. “Okay, you want to raise your own food? Be paid the same as everyone else for a different job than any of them are doing? What do you want to change?”

“Yeah. Let’s move to a farm.”

“Farms are for morning people. You were never a morning person.”

“Why do you have to make so much sense,” she whined, as her roommate took away her pillow as well, leaving her to be cold and nothing more. “Fine. Work.”

And work she did.