The phone buzzed. She ignored it so completely that the question of trees falling in forests came and went like an open-and-shut case. The phone buzzed again, and again, and again, with the same utter lack of response. To those not in the know, the safe assumption would’ve been that it was someone else’s phone that just happened to be there for some reason

Then, it buzzed slightly differently, and she picked it up with a quickness so profound as to deny recourse to popular idiom. Truly, learning Morse code had been a big boost to her socially mediated life

He sat down. It was done. Finished. Complete. All the i’s had been dotted and all the t’s crossed. All the major obstacles had been surmounted. And the intermediate, intermediary challenges that cropped up along the way, as unexpected as they were inevitable. All dealt with. All of it. It was done

He tried to feel the moment, here and now, but nothing came to him. No joy, no triumph, no rush of having overcome. Nothing. He was just deeply, profoundly and utterly tired, and had no real idea of what to do next, except sit

Perhaps, he thought, tired counts as an emotion too

She was whelmed. Just regular plain old whelmed, nothing fancy or special about it. The list of things to do seemed to contain ever more things, all of them reasonable and doable. The whelming quality didn’t belong to any one thing, but rather emerged as a function of sheer quantity. Just looking at the list made her realize that thinking about it any further would just lead to becoming unduly tired before getting anything done, and that simply would not do

The only way forward is through, she sighed, and began from the top

She looked everywhere for it. It was not in the bookshelves, where books usually hide out. Nor was it in any of the intermediary places where books end up whilst being read. It didn’t even turn up in any of the tertiary places where books probably should not be, but where they nevertheless turn up before being returned to their rightful shelves

At length, she concluded that she had lent it to someone and then never gotten it back. Not just this book, but some two-dozen odd other books as well

Perhaps, she mused, the world was all one great secret library, thinly disguised