Shortlist – 2026 Gooseberry Pie Writing Competition
by S A Greene
The Librarian wakens to find himself spreadeagled naked on the centre page of a book, with his modesty, such as it is, preserved only by the rows of text running across his flattened body. He can’t see the title of the book he’s embedded in, although he can raise his head just enough to see he’s in the Poetry section, which means it could be years before he’s discovered and rescued.
As he turns his head from left to right, his misery is compounded by the discovery that the font covering him is Times Roman, a font he finds boring and pinched, and the poor man’s only consolation is that at least it isn’t Comic sans.
He wishes he could be imprisoned in a book with a different font, and maybe short stories instead of poetry, or even biographies, if absolutely necessary, but then he chides himself for accepting this situation in the first place, which is so typical of him, accepting less than his due being the motif of his life, when you think about it, which he tries not to do, but in his current situation thinking about himself is pretty much all he can do and even if he’d had a great family, and even if he’d been promoted last summer instead of Dave, and even if Jennifer Blissett hadn’t left him for a pig-farmer who’d never read a word of Proust in his life, he’d still have struggled not to feel a little bit sorry for himself.
He opens his mouth to let a sigh escape but instead lines of poetry pour out, words and images and rhythms and sounds he hasn’t heard before but whose sentiments seem familiar, in a voice that sounds like his, only deeper, more certain, more resonant.
The Librarian finds himself transported by the soothing timbre of his own voice and the beauty of the poet’s words into a state of harmonious contentment where Jennifer Blissett and missed promotions and even boring typefaces aren’t important, and as the text across his body starts to fade and the pages of the book fall away from him, he realises he’s free to come down from the shelf and stride back into his life, but he stays where he is, rooted, speaking the poetry of himself, in the pure true voice which has waited so long for him to find it.
S A Greene’s stories have featured wombats, eels, capybaras, a musical vagina, various tables, ten testicles, a foetus with dodgy political views and a blue sponge.
Photo by Oleg Saprykin on Unsplash
