Small Spaces Books Novels & Stories

The leaders returned their duties immediately after we entered the building. This office is emptier compared to the one I operate from at home. It has been the same since the funeral. My footsteps are muffled by the rug as I make my way to the largest bookshelf in the space. There are books as thick as bibles and others as thin as children’s books. My eyes scan the spine of each, searching for the one I came all this way to find. Ah. Here it is. I reach out and grab it. I flip through the pages, shaking the book. It falls out.

I can’t explain it, but I don’t have to, either, if I don’t bring it up, and I’m not one to ever start conversations. I sniff the paperback—old, musty paper, glue, and Justus—and set it on the pallet. The next book in the pile, Peter Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread, has a picture of two men chopping down a tree on the cover. It smells the same. All the books are dog-eared paperbacks with yellowed pages—Walden by Henry David Thoreau, Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, Critique of Practical Reason by Immanuel Kant, several each by Ursula K. Le Guin and N. K. Jemison, and a massive hardback of Plato’s collected works. The Plato is the only one that looks like it hasn’t been read a hundre

Chapter 23: Almost The kitchen was small in the morning. It had never been small before. The penthouse was enormous by any reasonable measure, floor to ceiling windows, marble everywhere, the kind of space that was designed to make people feel the weight of what it cost. Liora had never once described it as small. This morning it was small. She was at the counter waiting for the coffee and he came in from the bedroom already dressed, dark trousers, shirt not yet buttoned at the collar, and the kitchen immediately lost approximately forty percent of its available space.

He wrote: Tell him the east window will put the morning light on the page. Claire did not reply immediately. When she did, she wrote: He said to ask you how wide the desk-sill is. Daniel looked at the margin sketch. He thought about the bridge book — the size of it, the cross-sections, the diagrams that required a generous surface to be read without folding the spine. He thought about the width that would accommodate the spread of material, the book and the notebook beside it and the pencil with room to move. He wrote: Wide enough for a book about bridges and a notebook open beside it.

"Clean clothes. I think you and I look alike. So the size should fit. But first, you need to go to the bathroom." The small room with the stove in the middle was filled with books that were everywhere. A variety of books adorned the stone walls and the dark red carpet that stretched up to the door. There were also books under the armchairs, under the sofa, and even under the table that stood by the window.

He shook her from his mind and pushed open the doors to the study. The rug-lined room was bigger than B’s above-garage apartment. Floor to ceiling bookshelves dampened any noise B might made in his whiskey search. There didn’t seem to be a single inch of space on any one of the shelves. Books of all colors, textures, and sizes were packed together. In front of the book spines sat hundreds of little treasures–seashells, pocket watches, glass figurines, and carvings of creatures. So many creatures. B let his fingers drift over the book spines: The Picture of Dorian Gray. The Catcher in the Rye. The Odyssey. Brave New World. The Call of the Wild. White Noise. So many stories he’d never read and

I need to take time. I remember the small room I entered last time. I slowly opened the door and turned on the lampshade. The books on the table were still scattered. I tried to look and read each one of them. These are all interesting books. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and a lot more. I tried to find something that might help me, but I found nothing.

If it weren’t for the fact I was not in the mood to be jovial, I might have laughed at her. The room was relatively small, its walls lined with hundreds of books. Most of which look old enough to belong to a museum rather than sitting in Lilith’s private miniature library. The smell of dust and decaying paper tickled my nose. Dust motes swirling around before me dancing in the thin beam of light coming from a small solitary window.

At least there, I can have peace. When I arrived at the garden, I felt the peace hugging me. 'Finally.' Away from those stabbing gazes, away from that annoying expression of Rosine, away from that indifferent male lead. Amongst the books I brought with me, there's one with an inconspicuous book with a simple red cover. "From One Space to Another" is the title of the book. It is a romance story about a girl who can teleport from one place to another and a boy who was from another parallel universe.

Homey. There were no glinting chandeliers or polished marble floors. The space was low-lit, warm, and masculine. A dark leather couch dominated the living room, draped with a fleece throw that looked like it had been dragged off a bed. A punching bag hung in the corner beside a dartboard riddled with holes. The kitchen was neat, almost suspiciously so—counters scrubbed clean, cabinets bare except for protein powder and three unopened bottles of whiskey. But it was the small details that threw me. A stack of books slumped against the wall—wolf history texts, leadership manuals, and, bizarrely, a slim volume of poetry wedged between them like a guilty secret.