By Amy Marques

I met Allie the first year I worked the summer program at the library, back when I still thought this would be temporary and I’d move on to serious research and serious scholars. At seven, Allie already knew our library stays open when schools close and there are snacks in the children’s section. I handed her Fruit Roll-ups with The Babysitter’s Club, Lunchables with Nancy Drew, and cupcakes with Alice Through the Looking Glass. The real one. Not one of those abridged versions.

By the time she moved on to Jane Austen and George Elliot, she’d taken to carrying a travel mug. Maybe she thought the fake coffee (we all knew the mug carried the juice box we handed out) tricked people into thinking she was older and allowed to sit in grown-up chairs, although I never told her to stay in the children’s section. I don’t think Ms. H, the head librarian, did either. 

Too soon, she was too old for juice boxes and fruit rolls. Most days, she grabbed a book and gravitated towards the third floor, where the woodsy scent of research books hovered over the silence. She napped there, sometimes. I mentioned it to Ms. H. I didn’t want to get Allie in trouble, but I didn’t know what else to do. 

Ms. H just nodded and said that’s what libraries are for, really. 

The next day, there was a box on the third-floor landing marked “FREE”. It was stocked with beef jerky and string cheese and crackers and fresh fruit. And, behind the encyclopedic Ws, where Ms. H found Allie had been keeping a change of clothes, there was a brand new copy of Where The Wild Things Are. On the last page, next to “and it was still hot” was a note written in Ms. H’s scrawling cursive: There’s some soup in the staff room on the stove. It’s probably still hot. Make yourself at home, dear. You’re family.

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Amy Marques has been known to call books friends and is on a first name basis with many fictional characters. She has been nominated for multiple awards and has visual art, poetry, and prose published in journals such as Streetcake Magazine, South Florida Poetry Journal, MoonPark Review, Bending Genres, Ghost Parachute, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Gone Lawn as well as being a returning contributor at Bright Flash Literary Review. More at https://amybookwhisperer.wordpress.com.