Chapter 12: Astoria, October 1999 — Sera Remembers

The station's library is a narrow room on the building's south face, two walls of metal shelving, a folding table, four chairs that don't match. Someone has left a coffee mug on the windowsill with a dried ring inside it. The light comes in flat and grey, the way Alaskan light does in October, diffused by cloud cover so even that there are no shadows, only a general, uniform diminishment of everything.

I came here after the dinner shift because my quarters felt too small for what I was trying to do, and the data room felt wrong — too much of his work on the walls, too many of his charts, too much of the thing I was trying to examine already present in the space. So I took my notebook and walked to the library, which smells faintly of the mildew that accumulates in any room that sees more moisture than heat, and I sat down at the folding table and I wrote the date at the top of a clean page.

Then I sat with my pen in my hand for a while.