Poetry Collection Books Novels & Stories

My focus is on the desk, the scattered contracts, and his huge desk. I plug in my headphones, queuing up a focus playlist, but my eyes - the memory of the last interview I had with him comes into focus: how I'd frozen when he looked at me, how he froze too, his face lingering on me far too long, the way his voice had dropped, rough and low, when he'd said, "You're hired." A book on the shelf catches my attention - Shakespeare's Sonnets. Odd for a man like him. I reach for it, my fingers brushing the book cover, and the entire shelf shifts with a quiet click.

Novels, grimoires, Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson. Wait, what? The Emily Dickinson? She hid most of her poems until the day she died, but looking at this book, holding it, it feels like everything she had written is in here. It's a lot, there were still poems of her that I haven't read yet, I never knew about its existence until now. I quickly opened the book and the pages were amazing, you know that scent of old books? This one has it, that one familiar scent of home, of comfortability, of coffee in the early morning while it's raining. I stopped on a particular poem, one I've read over and over again. I'm Nobody! Who are you?

Even if this is all I can offer, I hope it brings them peace. I push my magic forward, imagining a small blue fire consuming the poison cursing these poor animals, breaking them free of their bodies they're trapped in. They are nothing more than zombies trapped where they lay. They had been doomed to stay inside decaying shells and never be free, and I refuse to let that happen.

I dropped the panties back where they were and began to check the drawer. In it, she had some lotion, fingernails, and a book. In the bottom drawer, that is where the fun begins. She had 3 dildos of various sizes, lube, a vibrator, and a p**n magazine, which caught my attention. I grabbed and opened the magazine and started to flip through it. There was a naked posting for each session, and there was a picture of a girl licking the pussy of another girl.

He returned his attention to the bookshelf at the rear of his office, the one he’d been browsing when he’d first heard the strange sounds outside, only being made by the cats, after all. The top shelf held purely “literary works.” Poetry collections of Blake, Yeats, Robert Frost, and Shakespeare. Prose collections of Zora Neal Hurston, Hemingway, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Flannery O’Connor, and folktales collected by the Brothers Grimm. Novels, from The Man in the Iron Mask to Madame Bovary, to Villette and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, to A Passage to India by E. M. Forster.

I close the door quietly. I spend an hour in the smaller library looking at the books. He has everything. Fiction. Nonfiction. Art books. History. A whole shelf of poetry that looks like it has never been touched. I pull out a volume of Mary Oliver and flip through it. Someone has dog-eared a page. I read the poem. "Wild Geese." I read it twice.

I groaned in frustration and leaned against the door, ready to cry when the door pushed open and I fell in. It opened. It fucking opened! I jumped to my feet in happiness, ready to celebrate, when I took notice of the room, and I froze. This wasn't what a study should look like. I shut the door behind me and walked into the room that was dim with red light. Thin ropes decorated the space of the room from one end to the other and I ran my fingers through them, feeling how soft yet sturdy they were. Instruments that were a little hard to recognize from afar decorated the wall and when I inched closer, my jaw literally dropped to the floor. I would recognize what these were even in my sleep.

It’s difficult to work out what holds the least appeal; my CD’s – a collection of terrible mid 90’s pop, or Scott’s masses of books. “I’m amazed you’re getting rid of that,” I say as he adds a copy of ‘The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson’. “I’ve got two copies of it,” he shrugs. “What about your other books?” “I’m going to post them to my parents house,” he sighs. Spontaneously, I feel tears prick the backs of my eyes. All morning I’ve been more emotional than a guest on This Is Your Life, and it had to happen at some point. I studiously return to packing my things.

“You are pathetic.” Her body flinched at my words, but another wave of shivers covered her arms. “Dirty little doll.” The more I talked, the more her nipples were standing at attention, the more her breathing was getting heavier, the more her hands were gripping the fabric they were tied with. My fingers traced her leg. “I bet you are one of the people who like reading p**n books in public.” I moved to her other leg, gripping her ankle. “I bet you keep a straight face while your panties are getting soaked.”

It was open late, and the soft lighting inside looked like a scene from another world. I pushed the door open and stepped inside. The scent of old pages and wood polish welcomed me like a friend. I didn’t even look at the titles at first I just wandered the aisles, brushing my fingers along the spines of hardcovers, letting the silence cradle me. I paused in the poetry section. There was something honest about poetry. No filler. No fluff. Just raw, unfiltered emotion. I picked up a slim volume by an author I didn’t recognize and flipped through the pages of the book. I wasn't going to read it. it had coffee brown pages and if I knew anything that book was going to get me wrecked and I wasn’t