prompt: heat, title: the post-modern sisyphus in misc. flash fiction

Working in a library is, at its essence, a daily battle with the universal force of Entropy. I mean, sure, every other job is as well, just living is temporary defeat of physics’ tendency to degrade a system from more-ordered to less-ordered. Give yourself a high-five, first of all, for even being here still. It’s a sort of a miracle that anything has ever happened at all, if you look into the long odds against much more than gas and an occasional rock existing. Let alone persisting for a tiny while! High-fives all around, well-played living long enough to learn how to communicate.

But there’s something particular in the way that a library sits on the heaving edge of chaos, and exponential chaos at that, in such a direct and present manner. Order does not come easy, but to maintain order in a system takes the kind of energetic expenditure that’d make even Old Bobby Oppenheimer weep. One book out of place, by your own errors, by a patron rushing to re-shelf because their child is ripping a couch apart over the wrong flavor of Goldfish Crackers in their backpack, one tome seems like such a tiny thing, such a wee failure. But one book is never the end, every issue manifests itself with compounded interests. One single volume out-of-place is then misfiled around, put onto the shelf “correctly” in comparison to the one that’s wrong, and the whole situation spirals out-of-control from there. Two entropical instances quickly become four and then sixteen and so on and on until the whole thing collapses. Stephen King is in with the Nancy Drews, Hemmingway’s in the Japanese Comics, gonna have to shut the whole place down for a month just to make heads or tails of it. The Cold Death of the universe, all particles expanding and expanding further apart, until there is nothing close enough to anything else for the laws of physics to even apply to the stray lepton you may see every million years. Without energy forced back into the system, in the form of shelf-reading and putting errors right before they compound, it’s all some one-building diorama of the Big Freeze Hypothesis.

Every day you come back in and try to keep disorder localized, so it doesn’t run completely wild and consume you. Each day, you put in more energy than you receive in results, but it holds back high-tide with a tea-cup for one more spin of the sun. Again, all of life can be like that, from time to time, but when you’re trying to keep twenty-thousand books in any sort of order, that battle is immediately and directly obvious. The writing is almost literally on the walls, in the titles on the spine wedged into the shelves. Someday, the universe will die, by cold or by heat, so surely will I. But, one day at a time, I can hone the spines back to true for a little bit, so surely I will, at that.