The Girl in the Flammable Skirt_ Stories - Aimee Bender [17]
After lunch, the muscleman enters the library.
He is tan and attractive and his arms are busting out of his shirt like balloons. He is with the traveling circus where he lifts a desk with a chair with a person with a child with a dog with a bone. He lifts it up and never drops anything and people cheer.
He also likes to read.
He picks this library because it’s the closest to the big top. It’s been a tiring week at the circus because the lion tamer had a fit and quit, and so the lions keep roaring. They miss him, and no one else will pet them because they’re lions. When the muscleman enters the library, he breathes in the quiet in relief. He notices the librarian right away, the way she is sitting at her desk with this little twist to her lips that only a very careful observer would notice. He approaches her, and she looks at him in surprise. The librarian at this point assumes everyone in the library knows what is going on, but the fact is, they don’t. Most of the library people just think it’s stuffier than usual and for some reason are having a hard time focusing on their books.
The librarian looks at the muscleman and wants him.
Five minutes, she says, tilting her head toward the back room.
The muscleman nods, but he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. He goes off to look at the classics, but after five minutes, follows his summons, curious.
The back room has a couch and beige walls. When he enters the room, he’s struck by the thickness of the sex smell; it is so pervasive he almost falls over. The librarian is sitting on the couch in her dress which is gray and covers her whole body. Down the center, there is a row of mother-of-pearl buttons and one of them is unbuttoned by accident.
The thing is, the muscleman is not so sure of his librarian fantasies. He is more sure that he likes to lift whatever he can. So he walks over to her in the waddly way that men with big thighs have to walk, and picks her up, couch and all.
Hey, she says, put me down.
The muscleman loves how his shoulders feel, the weight of something important, a life, on his back.
Hey, she says again, this is a library, put me down.
He twirls her gently, to the absent audience and she ducks her head down so as not to collide with the light fixture.
He opens the door and walks out with the couch. He is thoughtful enough to bring it down when they get to the door frame so she doesn’t bump her head. She wants to yell at him but they’re in the library now.
Two of the men she has fucked are still there, in hopes for a second round. They are stunned and for some reason very jealous when they see her riding the couch like a float at a parade, through the aisles of books. The businessman in the vest holds up a book and after a moment, throws it at her.
You are not Cleopatra! he says, and she ducks and screams, then clamps her hand over her mouth. Her father’s funeral is in one day. It is important that there is quiet in a library. The book flies over her head and hits a regular library man who is reading a magazine at a table.
He throws it back, enraged, and they’re all over in a second, pages raining down, the dust slapping up into her face. They rustle as they fly and the librarian covers her face because she can’t stand to look down at the floor where the books are splayed open on their bindings as if they’ve been shot.
The muscleman doesn’t seem to notice, even though the books are hitting him on his legs, his waist. He lifts her up, on his tiptoes, to the ceiling of the library.
Stand up, he says to her in a low voice, muffled from underneath the couch, stand up and I’ll still balance you, I can do it even if you are standing.
She doesn’t know what else to do and she can feel his push upward from beneath her. She presses down with her feet to stand, and puts a finger on the huge mural on the ceiling, the mural of the fairies dancing in summer. Right away, she sees the one fairy