The Library of Unfinished Things

A short story

The Key

On the morning Mira decided to sell her father's bookshop, a brass key fell out of his shoe.

She had been clearing the room above the shop, putting useful things in one box and everything else in another. The key belonged in neither. Its teeth were crooked, and someone had tied a paper label to its bow.

For the door you keep walking past.

Mira sat on the bed.

Her father had been dead for seven months. She had become good at finding his handwriting unexpectedly and bad at knowing what to do afterward.

Downstairs, a buyer's letter waited beside the till. He wanted to turn the shop into a showroom for kitchen taps. Mira liked him. He paid promptly and had never told her that her father would have wanted her to keep the business.

She slipped the key into her pocket and carried a box downstairs.

Behind the travel shelves stood a narrow door. Her father had called it the cupboard, although Mira had never seen him put anything inside.

The key turned before she finished pushing it into the lock.

Beyond the door, rain tapped against a glass roof. Lamps hung above rows of shelves that extended farther than the building possibly could. Every shelf held books bound in plain grey cloth.

A woman at a desk looked up from repairing a torn page.

"You're late," she said.

"Was someone expecting me?"

"No. People usually are."

The woman wore a cardigan with one finished sleeve. A small plate on her desk read KEEPER OF THE UNFINISHED.

Mira picked up the nearest book. Its title was The Apology Daniel Never Sent.

Inside were three sentences, followed by two hundred blank pages.

"Where did these come from?"

"People leave things," the keeper said. "We make room."

There were half-written songs, abandoned voyages, and a recipe someone had never managed to ask her grandmother for. In an alcove stood a ladder leading to a shelf marked Tomorrow.[^1]

Mira walked until she found her father's name.

His book was thin. On the spine, beneath his name, were the words The Story for Mira.

The Borrowed Ending

When Mira was little, her father had told her about a sailor who carried a lighthouse in his coat pocket.

Each night, the sailor searched for an island that appeared only to people who had lost something. Each night, her father stopped before the sailor reached it.

"Tomorrow," he would say, switching off her bedroom lamp.

Then Mira grew old enough to read to herself. The sailor remained at sea.

Now she opened the grey book and found him on the deck of his little boat, holding the pocket lighthouse against the dark.

The last sentence read:

At dawn, he finally saw what waited on the shore.

Nothing followed.

Mira carried the book to the desk.

"Is there another volume?"

The keeper shook her head.

"Can you find out what he meant to write?"

"I can lend you an ending."

From a drawer, she produced a sheet of paper. Mira read about a sailor reaching an island where everyone he had ever missed waited beneath flowering trees. No one had changed. No one would leave again.

For a moment she could smell her father's coat drying by the stove.

"Was this his?"

"No."

"But it could have been."

"You could paste it in. After a while, you might remember it that way."

Mira looked at the sheet again. Her father would have objected to the trees. He had always insisted the island was too windy for anything taller than grass.

She put the ending down.

"Did he come here?"

The keeper pointed to a ledger.[^2] His name appeared on dozens of lines, sometimes with years between them.

Beside his last visit, he had written: Tried again. Still don't know what is on the island.

Mira laughed, surprising herself.

"He could have told me that."

"People find it difficult," said the keeper.

Mira turned back to the unfinished story. In the margin beside the sailor's boat was a drawing of a girl with enormous boots. She remembered demanding those boots. She had wanted to visit the island too, and had been concerned about wet feet.

"May I borrow the book?"

The keeper opened a smaller ledger.

"Return it when you have something to add."

The First Page

Back in the shop, the kettle was boiling. Mira could not remember switching it on.

She made tea, sat beside the till, and opened the buyer's letter. Then she called him.

"I need another week," she said.

He agreed. He sounded as though he was eating an apple.

For the rest of the morning, Mira sorted the books piled beneath the counter. Some were valuable. Some had been there since she was a child. One contained a pressed fern and a receipt for six pears.

At two, someone knocked on the window.

A boy stood outside with a bicycle helmet under his arm.

"Are you open?"

Mira looked at the sign. She had left it turned to Closed for seven months.

"For a little while."

He wanted a book about building boats. They found one with diagrams, though several pages had come loose from the binding.[^3]

"I can mend that," Mira said.

Her father had taught her how. She brought out the glue, a strip of cloth, and two heavy dictionaries to press the repair flat.

The boy watched.

"Have you ever built a boat?"

"No."

"Me neither."

He arranged to collect the book on Saturday.

After he left, Mira took a notebook upstairs. She wrote a few figures: rent, electricity, what she could earn by opening three days a week. The sums were difficult, but they were sums she could check.

Then she opened her father's story.

Below his last sentence, she wrote:

On the shore stood a girl in enormous boots. She had brought timber, a hammer, and a list of questions.

Mira paused, listening to the traffic outside.

"Your lighthouse is too small," the girl called. "You'll have to help me build another."

She left the next page blank and went downstairs to turn the sign.

Footnotes

[^1]: In the library, shelf labels describe why a work was abandoned rather than its subject. Tomorrow is its largest collection.

[^2]: The library records visits rather than dates due. Its keeper considers returning to an unfinished work an event worth recording.

[^3]: Loose pages do not always require a complete new binding. In this scene, Mira makes a small repair to secure the damaged section.