Through the Chief's Eye: Library Perspective

The sound of keys clicking muffled out the machine, lulling everyone into a state of calamity and order. A tempo was set, like that of a drum during a pow wow on the Columbia Gorge. Its beat was pounding, resonating with pulsating hearts, and keeping machinery in sync. Some of us are born with different wirings, short circuiting with influxes of power and beats different than those we are  familiar with. We are outcasts. Different than the perceived "normal". Branded by the combine as broken we are to be fixed in the chop shop. The pain there is unimaginable and the doctor looms above you becoming a mountain. With the burn of an anesthetic rushing through my veins, like the trout through the falls, the fog gets stronger. I get lost in the cloud sending a hand up, soon smothered and obscured by the mist. I'm broken from my thoughts as the copier starts to growl. The machinery doesn't want me to get to smart.

 I am monitored every second by the lady in the glass room called the librarian. She peers over everyone, her reflection forever glued on the glass pane. The single whisper of a word elicits a reaction in her. Eyes bulging, and a finger placed on her lip a "shhhhhhh" sound musters its way out of her puckered lips. Her stare is focused, precise, calculated. Her eyes are laser beams targeting and burning the only remains of the students emotions. She reminds me of that lady from the government.

"She sported a black blazer embellished with silver buttons, you know the ones at the department stores outside of Yakima. She was wearing sky high red heels, her white skin glowing under the setting autumn sun. She pursed her lips and knocked on the door her dainty fist splintered by our rough weathered door. I ran to the door and opened it wondering who this strange woman was. She looked like my mom a white woman, bigger than both my father and I. She asked if I lived her, and I hesitantly said 'Yes' calling out to a Dad I know would never come. She introduced her self as Missy a social worker. She grabbed my hand and dragged me to her car, my heels planting in the dirt a cloud of dust obscuring my view of our house, the last glimpse of my old life. She told me about the orphanage and how my parents where to unfit to raise me. This was my first introduction to the system. I tried responding telling her I'm fine but she didn't listen. I cried and cried her face blank and emotionless not listening to a word I said. She forced me into a box, with every word sucking out the oxygen until I couldn't breathe any more"

I was awakened by the jostling of my arm, the librarian rushing over telling me to shelf the books. Fear rushed down my toes as her hand patted my elbow. She had on a smile, her real emotions hidden behind her lipstick, the color of those mercury thermometers. I pretend to be deaf and she walked away back to her station. I looked at the books trying to decipher the words, sounding out the vowels. I order them by letters a before b and b before c. The system is rigid keeping everything in place. I give up and place the book on the shelf feeling smaller and smaller the fog rolling through the vents.  I let the combine sweep me up as I continue my work.