LITTLE FREE GALAXY
Chapter 3
“Magic,” Jon stated with absolute conviction, crossing his arms over his pajama shirt. “Or aliens. Like I said before. And I think they’re friendly aliens because they’re giving us presents.”
Arya adjusted her glasses, her expression deadly serious. “Magic is just science we don’t understand yet. And if it’s aliens, they are operating with materials engineering and localized light-manipulation that is decades - maybe centuries - ahead of anything on Earth. So, practically speaking, Jon is right. If it can’t be terrestrials, it has to be extraterrestrials.”
Jim rubbed his temples, a headache beginning to form directly behind his eyes. Antonia sighed, picking up I, Robot and running her thumb over the impossibly smooth, star-mapped cover. “Okay. Let’s operate under the assumption that this isn’t a prank. We keep an eye on the library. We log everything that comes in. And we absolutely do not tell anyone else about this until we know more.”
With a simple nod from Jim, the living room broke into a flurry of activity. Arya and Jon began to draft coverage plans for this impromptu data collection exercise. Jon was loudly demanding that everyone wait to do anything until he located his pink, troll-hair tipped pen, Arya was busily sketching a map of their front yard in a Harry Potter-themed notebook, and Antonia and Jim looked nervously at one another, wordless.
Jim gestured with his head toward the kitchen. Antonia followed him, leaving the kids to their frantic, joyful planning. Once out of earshot, Jim leaned heavily against the marble counter, burying his face in his hands.
“I don’t understand what is happening,” Jim muttered, the rigid structures of his engineering mind rebelling against the evidence sitting on his own coffee table. “Things don’t just appear. Matter isn’t created from thin air. It violates every law of physics.”
Antonia crossed her arms, her lawyer’s instinct for rational defense kicking in. “There has to be a simple explanation, Jim. A viral marketing campaign. Some senior high school project. Someone is messing with us.”
“With materials that defy modern science?” Jim asked, looking up. He felt a profound, unsettling loss of control. He was a man who built things, who fixed things, who understood how the physical world fit together. It didn’t make sense.
Antonia looked back toward the living room, where Jon was giggling and Arya was intensely debating the merits of tactical flashlights. “Look at them, Jim. They aren’t scared at all. To them, this is the greatest adventure of their lives. Whatever is doing this, it hasn’t hurt us. Let’s just gather more evidence.”
Over the next several weeks, the Little Free Library transformed from a neighborhood book exchange into a portal of the impossible. The deposits always arrived on Mondays, always seeming to appear in the fraction of a second when no one was looking.
On the next Monday, a copy of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary appeared. It was heavier than the others, bound in a crystalline substance that felt warm to the touch. When Jim held it to his ear, he swore he could hear a faint, high-pitched hum, like the vibration of a microscopic engine.
“What a good book!” he announced, opening the pages to begin reading aloud to his children. “You guys are going to love Rocky.”
Jim sequestered the crystalline book in his garage that night. He was determined to apply the very lessons the novel taught: Observe the environment, form a hypothesis, isolate the variables, and test. He set up a digital trail camera focused squarely on the Little Free Library, hoping to capture the mysterious benefactor in the act. But the following Monday morning, after a new book was announced and paraded around by his ebulliently excited son, Jim went to review the camera footage. He painstakingly pored over every frame of every second for an eight-hour period of video. There was absolutely nothing to indicate that anyone - or anything - had even touched the library.
The new book, as it turned out, was The Three-Body Problem. Jim had to chuckle, as one of the core themes of the book - that there is no general solution to the three-body problem in physics - seemed to echo the stultifying confusion he was beginning to feel over the problem of the mystery books. But how can I form a hypothesis if the environment is fundamentally un-observable?
The cover of this new book was itself a terrifying, mesmerizing display of chaotic physics. Three distinct, glowing spheres orbited each other within the binding, their paths completely random. If Jon stared at it for too long, he complained that it made him feel dizzy.
Monday evening, in something that was becoming strangely routine, the family sat down to read this new book aloud. Arya, bubbling over with eager curiosity at the advanced concepts discussed on the pages, interrupted her dad every few pages. Eventually, a frustrated Jim set the book down.
“Arya, if you interrupt me every few seconds, we’re never going to get through the book,” he said crossly.
His daughter looked down sheepishly. “I’m sorry, Dad. It’s just that I’m dealing with the realization that the universe isn’t neat and organized. Is it really so full of chaos? And if it is, how can we ever be certain that we understand what’s going on in the universe?”
Jim laughed sharply, and Arya crossed her eyes at him. “What?” she demanded.
“Nothing,” Jim chuckled. “It’s just the wisdom beyond your years showing.”
Another Monday, and another book appeared, sitting alone on the top shelf. This time, it was 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it was entirely different from the others. It didn’t glow. It didn’t shift. It didn’t make a sound. It was a perfect, seamless slab of absolute, pitch-black material that absorbed the ambient light of the living room. The cover had no title and no text.
This one puzzled everyone. Jim dutifully took it back to his workbench and stared at it for a while. He took out his trusty, weather-worn, blue-and-white flexible measuring tape and began to make a record of its length, width, and height. After he finished the last recording, he went to move on to his next measurement, but something about the numbers made him pause. Fumbling around in his toolbag, Jim reached his hand to the bottom and pulled out his calipers. Not a tool he used often, but he had to be sure. He aligned the spokes of the calipers meticulously and read the measurement.
Crap, he thought. The dimensions were exactly 1 to 4 to 9—the squares of the first three integers.
Maybe it really is aliens, he thought as he brought the book back inside from his garage. He stopped in front of the circular, chest-high mirror in their living room. At 40 years old, he realized he was looking a bit long in the tooth; his normally-short, sandy brown hair was growing a bit unkempt with gray hairs poking out at odd angles, stubble was growing uncustomarily on his chin, and the perpetual black rings under his eyes were looking particularly stark.
He looked at the reflection of the book in the mirror and jumped. Not from his own image, however. Though he couldn’t have explained it if he’d tried, he could’ve sworn that the book was looking back at him in the mirror.
He glanced down at it in his hands. Still solid black. And yet he couldn’t help but feel that some ancient experiment was about to reach its climax.
Despite his sense of foreboding, Jim was almost relieved when Arya brought in a glowing copy of Contact inside from the Little Free Library the following Monday. Its cover pulsed with a soft, rhythmic white light. Ever the budding scientist, she spent an entire evening sitting on the floor with a stopwatch, counting the flashes. “Two, three, five, seven, eleven,” she whispered to her parents, her eyes wide. “It’s flashing in prime numbers.”
“The mystery continues!” Jim boomed, laughing. Antonia glared at his outburst.
“What?” he retorted, feigning mock indignation. “I’m laughing into the unknown!”
Finally, on a rainy Monday afternoon, they found The Giver. At first glance, it was the most normal book of the bunch. It was entirely grayscale, resembling a faded black-and-white photograph. But the moment Jon picked it up, vibrant, blooming color bled out from his fingertips, washing over the cover like watercolor paint on wet paper. When he set it down, the color instantly drained away, returning to stark gray.
Seven books. Seven impossible objects.
By the end of the week after The Giver joined their family, the tension in the house was palpable. The coffee table had become a glowing, humming, shifting museum.
But as another Monday came and went, the library remained uncharacteristically empty of new books. Their check before the school bus arrived came up empty; Jim’s peek before leaving the driveway that morning revealed nothing; Jon’s sprint up the sidewalk resulted in nothing; and every 15 minutes after that until dinnertime, the family took turns walking out to the end of the driveway, opening up the library door with a familiar squeak. Still nothing.
“Maybe they’re waiting for us to do something,” Arya whispered to herself, standing in front of the library in the gathering twilight.
—
It was 11:45 PM on Monday night. Jim and Antonia had retreated upstairs over an hour ago. But Arya and Jon were wide awake, crouched furtively behind the living room sofa, a heavy fleece blanket pulled over their shoulders. The front curtains were drawn wide open, offering a clear view of the Little Free Library bathed in the amber glow of the streetlight.
The silence of the house was oppressive, amplified by the ticking of the kitchen clock. Arya’s heart beat a frantic, staccato rhythm against her ribs. She was exhausted, yes, but beneath the fatigue was a vibrating, electric thrill. This was better than any book she had ever read, because she was the protagonist.
Jon, on the other hand, was struggling. The initial adrenaline of the stakeout had long since burned off, leaving him fighting a losing battle against his own biology. His small body practically ached for sleep, and the shadows in the corners of the living room were beginning to look menacing in the dark.
“What if they’re scary?” Jon whispered suddenly, his earlier bravado faltering. “What if they aren’t friendly aliens?”
Arya pulled the fleece blanket tighter around his shoulders. “We don’t even know if they are aliens yet,” she reasoned, her voice soothing. “And besides, they gave us The Giver. A book about how important feelings and memories are. Scary monsters don’t care about things like that.”
“We just have to catch them,” Jon whispered back, rubbing his heavy, drooping eyes. “If we see who drops it off, we can talk to them.”
“Focus, Jon. Don’t blink,” Arya commanded.
Outside, the street was dead quiet. A cold autumn wind rustled the remaining dead leaves clinging to the oak tree, but nothing else moved.
“My eyes are tired,” Jon complained, his head bobbing slightly.
“Just close them for two seconds to rest then,” Arya conceded, feeling the intense sting of fatigue in her own eyes. “I’ll keep watch. Go.”
Jon squeezed his eyes shut. A second later, Arya rubbed her eyes beneath her wire-rimmed glasses, allowing herself just a fraction of a moment of darkness.
When they opened their eyes, the glass door of the Little Free Library was swinging gently on its brass hinges.
“Go!” Arya hissed, throwing off the blanket.
They scrambled over the sofa and bolted out the front door, their socked feet silent on the freezing concrete. They reached the wooden box and peered inside, their breath pluming in the cold night air.
Resting on the bottom shelf was a new book. But it wasn’t glowing, or made of metal, or shifting in color. There was no writing, no flowing script, no identifying title. It was bound in a simple, beautiful material that looked like a deep, cloudless night sky.
Arya pulled it out. Her hands were shaking as she flipped it open to the first page. It was completely blank. She flipped to the middle. Blank. She rapidly thumbed through the entire thick volume. Every single page was a stark, brilliant, empty white.
“There’s no story,” Jon said, his voice laced with profound, crushing disappointment. “It’s broken.”
Arya stared at the blank pages, her brow furrowing in thought. She looked back at their dark house, then down at the book. “No,” she said slowly. “I don’t think it is.”
An image of Dr. Ellie Arroway popped into her head. The Contact heroine, she remembered, spent years listening to the empty static of space, waiting for a signal, realizing that true communication required someone brave enough to speak first.
She ran back into the house, leaving Jon standing by the oak tree, and returned a moment later with a black Sharpie marker from her father’s desk. She opened the book to the very first blank page.
“They’ve been giving us stories,” Arya said, popping the cap off the marker, “maybe it’s time we gave them ours.”
With careful, deliberate handwriting, she wrote a single sentence in the center of the page:
We are Jim, Antonia, Arya, and Jon. Thank you for the books.
Underneath the sentence, Jon carefully added his own messy, block-letter signature. Arya signed beneath his.
She closed the cover. They gently placed the book back onto the shelf, closed the squeaky glass door, and secured the brass latch.
They tiptoed back into the house, the adrenaline finally giving way to bone-deep exhaustion. They crept up the stairs, silently slipping into their respective bedrooms. As Jon pulled his heavy comforter up to his chin, he looked out his window one last time. The library sat silently under the streetlight, a tiny beacon in the dark.
He closed his eyes, drifting off to sleep with the image of shifting stars and pulsing prime numbers dancing behind his eyelids.
When he opened his eyes again, he wasn’t in his bedroom anymore.
