The library (A real conversation that never happened)

     "You had a beard, just a little while ago, and now you don’t," she said in between Tennesse Williams and Upton Sinclair. She was standing in my aisle of the two story library. The aisle where if you listen closely, you can hear the anxious silence of the closed books, books clamped between other books. She had her fingertip on the worn spine of a book, feeling its years in the waving trenches of her fingerprint. I fought the avalanche of chill in my own worn spine. 
     “Yeah,” I said shortly. The tapping of keyboard-tapping from the first floor filled the aisle’s silence. I was listening for the books. 
     "I could tell. There is a sad look on your chin, you know?" She wasn’t going to let me listen to the books without first satisfying her need for conversation She continued, "Isn’t it silly how we feel entitled to things, like your beard? or to silence? or to books?"
     “It was my beard.” I opened a book, and spoke towards the dual pages. 
     "You liked it, did you?" She touched her chin, feeling for an invisible beard.
     “Yes, I was attached to it, or it was attached to me I guess.” Which was it? Both, I guess. It came from me, but it was only a beard, how could I be attached to what I could grow again.
     "You should have kept it then, I assume you washed those little hairs down the sink. Should have kept them," her finger was gliding along a shelf, following steps that brought her closer to me. 
     “Right.”
      "So you shaved your face off, and then you came to the library. What is next for you then?" She said facing me, her breath hovered and twined with the smell of settled paper. 
     “I’ll read.” I started, “But I won’t rub my chin.”
     "I can’t see you with a beard," she said and made me smile. 
     “Thats because I don’t have one.”
     "What book should I read?" She peeked over the opened book in my hands, Woody Allen. 
     “Any book you want, whichever has the best cover I suppose.” 
     She came close, forced me to look her way, "How do you choose?"
     “Me? I stack them up in my arms. A nice clutch of books. All sorts.” I started grabbing from the shelves on either side of us. It was a like a two stepped dance. In my arms Bukowski, Miller, and on the higher shelves, Vonnegut, Orwell, Williams and Wells. I began to tilt harder on each side as the books stacked in my arms. “I get as many as I can, novels and novels and novels and more. And then I throw them as hard as I can, and whichever flies the furthest is the book for me!”
     And in my dance, she stepped with me, grabbing Rice, and Douglas Adams, the Fitzgeralds. We tossed them like frisbees to the ground below. They fluttered like doomed doves in the air before dropping and cluttering onto the heads of the seated typists. They smashed the screens of the glowing computers. Those silent books, falling from the thrust of our hands created calamity for those not expecting to be berated with literature on a monday night in the school library.  
     "Yes, Williams flaps hard and can make the distance, but Bukowski is direct and direct.” I said to her as we rained the books over the banister. “Adams will try to fly for space, but always comes crashing to Earth.” I said as she threw The Hitchhiker’s Guide collection into the air, it fell directly onto the head of a seated, headphone wearing girl. 
     When we were finished, and our arms were clutching nothing, and the books sprawled on the floor of the library’s first floor. Computers were tipped onto the ground and those who had caught a book in the face crawled along the moaning floor. I was later apprehended by campus police, but the girl wasn’t charged and got off on the grounds that, as the counselor would later tell me, “She was a figment of my highly deranged mind.”  What a nice beard the counselor had.
  

Author's Note

Trying something new

Reviews

[Chadvonswan]

Hahah oh man I loved this, it had me smiling throughout the text. Keep up the New Work Zak, I love it and it's getting better and better.
P.S. Did you shave your beard?

[ZackOfBridge]

Yeah, I had to. Gracie botched a trim, but its okay. I still love her. Thanks max, Ill keep it up, for you brah, for you!