Firecracker

kaboom kaboom shanananana na nanananana

  So here I am sweating all severe at a study table, my nose fake-poking in a fantasy anthology I was barely interested in called, Mists of the Mawgwan¹. I adjust my glasses. A nervous reaction. There’s the zipping again. Teeth unlocking somewhere in the stacks of the Chuck Parsnips Bookatory². The vibrato is unnerving and the now familiar zzhup and zzhaw makes my lymphatic system stiffen defensively. Not that anything terrible had ever happened. It’s just knowing something will happen. I can never imagine what.
  I wait a little longer than I remember waiting before. What secret manoeuvres were unfolding unseen somewhere in the escherian layout of the bookstore? I leaned into the airspace, listening for more clues but nothing. Zilcho.
  The anticipation is giving me shaky-leg, a reaction I am loath to tolerate in others, so I evacuate my comfy nook and take a shuffle around to see what character might have slipped through this time.
  Due to my latent ophidiophobia³, I am easily distracted by the letter S and freeze-stall looking at the spines of Mīḍāb Sarkar’s Rusty Codpiece trilogy⁴, when I smell the compound bouquet of sawdust and creosote. It was unmistakably out of the ordinary for the musty alkaline of the Bookatory so I knew something was about to be up.
  “Up here,” says a nasal whee, a vocal affectation I’d associate with the voices from Slow Lemons⁵ or Tourniquet Play⁶.
  There they were, up in the corner, on an abandoned shelf, more suited for a dachshund-sized Grotesque than the miniature but lanky humanoid grinning at me.
  It’s unclear what they need with my attention so I shrug and send a little ghuh⁷ sound in their general direction. And before I offer any more ambivalence, they clamber down from the lookout and side skip down the wall of books toward ziggurats-zygotes, motioning for me to follow.
  My instincts tell me to ding dong in the other direction, but the curiosity magnets are firing strong today so I big-stride after them.
  They’re heading into the Chamber of Non-Fiction, a place I generally stay away from. Not that I’m adverse to a little hello reality. It’s just I can get that at home, waking up alone at three in the morning with a foot cramp.
  The zipperling stops suddenly, planting their feet and scanning a row of books, “Six six two, six six two, six six two point one! Pyrotechnics!” they shout, waving me closer.
  Under the skylight they’re bathed in hot yellow beside the monolithic brown shadow of the big boy reference bookcase. They’ve got a mini mullet with barely long curls at the back. Their piscine face shines and catches the light as they expand their cheeks excitedly. I’m not sure what you’d call the body wrap they wore. Mummy suit was probably close enough.
  They unsheath the Big Book of Fireworks from its neighbors and press it against my belt buckle.
  “Eleven!” they project up at my face, commanding my attention.
  “Where?” I blurt, too curious to let the double sticks hang there.
  “Not where, when,” they say, looking disappointed. Their eyes welling up, dripping around the edges.
  “Ten?” just seems to follow naturally. And I start to tell them as much, but the explanation is cut short with an enthusiastic interjection.
  “Yes yes, it follows. Ten, the corpus maximus⁸, five double dances of the Twin Macabre⁹, and the ten divine nodes on the Lifetree¹⁰,” they say, rocking on their heels.
  “And the Dewey D System¹¹,” I sneak in, hoping to impress them with my prescient observations, but it wasn’t what they were looking for. They project more sad eyes and drooping. I should have tried Lords-a-leaping.
  “Then nine,” I said, changing the count. Still holding the BBoF and sensing an expanding expectation. An intensity in the air. A crackle crinkling the subtle drone of the building and its inhabitants. I couldn’t help but think it was the harbinger of some imminent combustion but it was more like the groaning contractions of birth, engorged with fresh cells and new blood.
  “Nine like the realms. Multiply with me,” they suggest, this time more casual, as they point their mummy hip to the south and stick out their elbow, “Give me another number”
  “That’s all I’ve been doing,” I say, not meaning to be funny. They just stare and wait. The expectation groans again, “Okay okay, let’s say 71. You didn’t give me any particular parameters, so I’m picking 71.”
  “Very good, so what is 9 times 71?” they ask me like I’m just going to pop out the answer pooditty dooditty.
  I pause for a beat, not to appear too eager, then stack the numbers on an imaginary board in front of me and tell them. It’s 639.
  “Now add those numbers together, then add the resulting digits together,” they say, suddenly pointing their hip in the other direction.
  “Funny, it equals 9¹²,” I say, trying to be non-plussed.
  “Nine, nine, nine, nine, nine. Always nine, every time. Not a trick really, it’s because—“
  “Ten begets nine¹³,” I jump in with a little more plus.
  So now, I hold their attention. A loose grip maybe, but a handful of interest for the moment.
  The book smells like it’s off-gassing. Bitter. Dank. A memory of expired medicine in yellowing plastic.
  “Did you know there are eight exits in this building?” they ask. Possibly hypothetical.
  I assume this is information we’re going to need shortly, “Perhaps tell all of us here,” I say, careful to keep the book steady in my two hands while craning my neck in a big circle indicating the other Bookatorians in our view.
  “North, East, West, South, Up, Down, Through, and —,” the last direction, an underhand confetti throw into an imaginary cosmos, they mime in slow motion and mouth the word Woosh.
  “Seven,” I say, goading them to continue.
  “Voyages¹⁴ and vespers¹⁵. We’re ships in the valley,” they say excitedly, perhaps titillated by the playful volleys.
  “You don’t make any sense,” I say, “especially here, in the Chamber,” reminding them of the dry academic pall of history in this dusty section. I use my leg to fan around the area.
  “I am sensing both skepticism and flippancy, an understandable reaction considering,” they tell me, “but hang on for a moment—”
  “I am hanging on but I really think you should take the book back. Can’t we just slip it on the shelf and pretend we never started this dangerous protocol? I once held on to a firecracker too long when I was seven years old. Uncle Helgason was throwing them in the steel milk can at Gramp’s birthday party, and said I could give it a shot. But once that fuse was lit, I was enchanted by the gleam, the glow, the slow fizz burn curling toward my thumb and forefinger. Come to think of it, I couldn’t let go. My pincers would not un-pince, and I watched the mini-ordnance flashbang like a tiny exploding sun in my hand.”
  “Six,” says the zipperling now sounding hurt, fat saline baubles running down its fishy face, “I’m afraid we have to keep going, so hold on a little longer. It’ll be over soon.”
  “Five,” I said, uncharacteristically resigned to get the whole thing over with. My tendency to meander and angle my motivations indirectly suddenly confronted with this large format work of impending expectations.
  “Four,” they say, drying up a little and revealing what I might call a corner-smile, though it was definitely lop-sided.
  I scanned the stacks again, but everyone was gone. Someone even left a cheesecutter cap¹⁶ and maroon umbrella. The BBoF was pulsing now like something was pushing to get out. My countdown partner’s face widened and heightened, seemingly syncing with the great growing pressure surrounding us.
  “I’m gonna do it,” I say quickly under my breath.
  “Do it,” they say, puffing their cheeks and holding their breath.
  “3-2-1,” I pronounce the numerals together like they’re one word. Linking them to our countdown in rapid succession.
  “Very good, very good. That’s it, thank you,” they say as the barometer unexpectedly drops, the book cools, and the active maelstrom of energy is vanquished away.
  And in the place where I was expecting a great kaboom, there was only the auditory wobble of a vacuum. My ears pop a little, like I am descending from the peak of a mountaintop. A calm clarity returns but there is an unsettling question looming between us.
  “Did they go off?” I ask, squinting into the skylight.
  “Yes, they did go off,” the zipperling says, half satisfied, half relieved.
  “Where?” I say, putting the book down.
  “Not here¹⁷,” they say, turning up the other corner of their mouth.

1. Mists of the Mawgwan, by Cerberus Chattle (2031). Two out of five stars, though the cover featuring a shirtless warrior with whispy tendrils of water vapor encircling their legs is quite arresting.

2. Chuck Parsnips was the Mayor of Gum Canyon from 2213-2216 PB. He was an effervescent appreciator of the arts and was instrumental in starting the Books In Tubes program during the fog years.

3. The fear of snakes.

4. Mīḍāb Sarkar’s Rusty Codpiece trilogy includes Light Up The Land With Lasers, Queen of Denial, and Fear vs Bone. Most famous for a chapter in the latter book including a list of one thousand goblin names.

5. Radio play by Seventh City (approx. 2102)

6. Radio play (musical) by Purgatorian Pirates (approx. 2105)

7. Like the sound of swallowing but in reverse.

8. The Greatest Body, possibly also the biggest - 10/10

9. Sacred Ritual in Dark Dualism (pre-fog).

10. The ten Sefirot from the Kabbalah.

11. The Dewey Decimal Classification system organizes library materials into ten main subject categories (000-900), using numbers and decimals for increasing specificity. Developed by Melvil Dewey in 1876.

12. Casting out nines - Any multiple of 9 has digits that sum to 9

9 × 23 = 207 2+0+7 = 9

9 × 111 = 999 9+9+9 = 27 → 2+7 = 9

13. In base 10, the number 10 is congruent to 1 (mod 9), meaning decimal place values are transparent to divisibility by 9—only individual digits matter. Any multiple of 9 has digits summing to 9, a property called the digital root.

14. The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor is a cycle of tales from One Thousand and One Nights.

15. The evening prayer service at sunset, is the sixth of seven canonical hours in liturgical traditions.

16. Also called a flat cap, is a rounded cap with a small stiff brim in front. Originating in 14th-century Britain, it became the working-class headwear of choice by the 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly among laborers, newsboys, and factory workers.

17. Philosopher Gaston Bachelard's concept of intimate immensity from The Poetics of Space (1958) describes how enclosed spaces can contain or deflect vastness. The Bookatory (or even the BBoF) functions as such an intimate enclosure while the fireworks represent explosive immensity. Through the countdown, concentrated action within intimate space channels destructive force elsewhere: the kaboom detonates in the vast "there" precisely because the protagonist performs the protocol "here." The Bookatory becomes what Bachelard calls a felicitous space, a dimensional valve where small, protective geometry touches and redirects infinite forces without rupturing the sanctuary itself.