By Alex J. Tunney
After the school day was over, I would walk to my job at the library, which was just out of the way or seemingly always on your way to something else or, more specifically, located on a stretch of road slightly between two neighborhoods and surrounded by areas that aren’t parks but trees grow there unbothered anyway, and occasionally, after completing my assignments—the books ultimately ended up where they belonged—I would hide away, out of the way of supposedly prying eyes with my back against the brick wall, trying to dive into another world while trying to figure out my own because at the time I didn’t have the words myself—no—truly, I was afraid to discuss out loud what I was ‘dealing with’ but the library had a number, a Dewey Decimal number, that classified it: 306.76, which was a number that I memorized and was a shelf that I must have hovered around multiple times before even daring to take a peek of what was located there.
Alex J. Tunney is somewhere in New York and has been published in Lambda Literary Review, The Rumpus, The Billfold, The Inquisitive Eater, and Pine Hills Review.
Photo by Adam Gianforcaro.