Giselle,I’d call when she was out in the garden, but she’d only ignore me and flick her tail, as though I were another fly, one of the thousands that seemed to be breeding in Orlon. Even my own cat disliked me. What had I expected? Life was no better here in Orlon, despite what my brother had promised, only hotter, buggier, far more humid than New Jersey at its worst. The library where I found myself employed was underfunded: there was one other librarian, Frances York, who had worked at the same post for forty years and whose eyesight was now failing — hence my job. Untrustworthy as I might be, I was to be her eyes.

This is what I saw: Most of the shelves were empty. Bud­get cuts. Public’s lack of interest. I had more books packed in cartons and left in storage in New Jersey than the Orlon Public Library had in its entirety. There were no computers available to the patrons, only one ancient word processor at the desk, and an old-fashioned card catalog was still in use. As for the reference department, there didn’t seem to be one. After several weeks at work, there’d been only three calls of any kind: two concerning the proper use of fertilizer, and a third from a second-grader wanting to know what medical school Dr. Seuss had gone to. Maybe I should have lied to my young caller, but it wasn’t in my nature to do so. When I told her that her favorite author wasn’t a doctor, that in fact his last name wasn’t even Seuss, she hung up on me. I sup­pose no one had told her before that she mustn’t trust words, not even the ones in books.

Because we were a college town, the students at Orlon had their own high-tech facility, so our little building was all but invisible to them. And as our budget didn’t allow the purchase of any new editions, even the local folks stayed away. The only weekly activity was the nursery-school read­ing club, but that group was nearly disbanded after I read “The Goose Girl,” a tale in which a truth-teller, a beloved, loyal horse named Falada, continues to speak long after his severed head is mounted on the wall. Frances took back the position of reader, even though she was nearly blind and had to hold a book right up to her face to make out the story.