Brass Pendulums in the Library Archives

Brass Pendulums in the Library Archives

I was at my local library looking for my tax documents, but the genealogy aisle kept stretching back into a dimly lit reading room I'd never seen before. A woman who was simultaneously my high school librarian and my grandmother was sitting behind a glass counter, filing tarot-sized index cards. She told me I couldn't check out my birth certificate until I aligned the brass pendulums hanging from the ceiling. When I touched one, it felt freezing cold, and the carpet pattern underneath shifted into geometric circles. I felt this heavy, uncanny dread, convinced that if I knocked them in the wrong sequence, the front doors wouldn't lead back to my street anymore, but just into endless rows of locked archives.