Better (Ltd)

We begin with a version of the library as it once was, built around a large circular room that is bright white and capped by a dome rising over two storeys. It recalls Oxford’s Radcliffe Camera, but without its eighteenth-century gravitas, its blank walls reaching all the way back beyond that time to antiquity. Any visitors move through the space clockwise, encountering first the desk for issuing books, then, almost back-to-back, returns desk and exit, with the librarians’ area held between them and connected by a third station, for enquiries. There are no screens.

Bookshelves line the walls between tall windows and extend inward towards the centre like spokes, each topped by an artwork: surrealist images - Eden, Lady Macbeth, Aidos veiled in white. At the centre, seats are arranged for readers waiting their turn to enquire about the best books to read on coping strategies, or how to learn French, or a book once mentioned by someone now dead, whose title has slipped away. A set of stairs curves up the far wall, leading to a second storey.

Emily locks the front doors, closing out the darkness outside and returning to the enquiries desk - the only one of the three which remains. Beside it is a storage container, full of the day’s returns. She flips open the lid. Is it really worth shelving these now? But she feels, for a sense of completeness, it will be.

The issue and return desks have long since been replaced by self-scan machines and a box to dump the books. A couple of monitors stand near the central seats, but the library remains, for the most part, analogue. Decades after it was built, it is occupied, tended, but threadbare. Everything is in its right place, yet that can’t hide the exposed black underfloor along the walkways to Family and Childhood.

At the entrance, a notice is fixed to the glass, sellotape pressed flat and precise at the corners.

Under New Management as of 20 January 2026

There will be a short closure period for refurbishment.

Better (Ltd)

She sifts through the Returns bin, and a few stray leaves brittle as parchment fall out. They’re too far gone for a bit of sellotape, however carefully applied.

She gathers an armful. Most will go back to the shelves, some to Repairs, the rest to be relocated to wherever they properly belong. Returns, Repairs, Foundlings.

Emily looks at the one on top. Lingerie. It circulates often, though she can never remember where it is meant to live. She hesitates - Language or Childhood? Finally lands on Language.

‘The A Lister was seen buying linn-ger-ee,’ she said, reading from the trashy mag. Her cousins, twelve and fourteen and with at least two years on her, shared a look, in an instant she knew she was wrong.

‘Laun-jer-ay,’ said one, laughing. ‘It’s French, you div.’

Emily checks Language. The reference is wrong. Of course it is. The tedium of returning, again and again, to the same section suggests she ought to have known this already, because it is always Childhood in the end.

She takes Lingerie back there, the largest section, positioned where everyone must pass it on the way in. She slides the book into place. There will be others for Childhood, she knows; she may as well look while she is here.

She checks down the spines and stops at Wrong Shoes.

The parents of every other little girl in Emily's class had understood which pair were correct. She’d been sent in with the knock offs with the wrong colour sole and no trinket. Begging her parents for the real pair made no impact.

‘When somebody says “your shoes are ugly”,’ her dad had said, ‘You say, “well that doesn't matter, because I like them”.’

She did not like them.

Now, with children of her own, the balance tips differently. She isn’t interested in building character - more of smoothing the way. Oh, she’s heard herself saying her dad’s words, too. But they’re prefaced by the question: ‘well, do you like the shoes?’

There are a couple more titles for Childhood. Most Effort - she’d known she was receiving a school award, but not which one, until she stepped on the stage. Mortifying. Smelly Finlay - when she’d joined in playground name-calling that was both cruel and untrue. That one makes her feel itchy, uncomfortable in her own clothes, every time. The snagged plastic cover nicks her as she places it back on the shelf.

She doesn’t have to do this tonight. She could leave them out. But she’d always know. And maybe there’s something respectful in putting them where they belong.

She glances at the few titles left in her hands. One, a new edition, recently rediscovered - Supporting Friends Through Grieving. She flicks through, her throat tightening at the pages and pages of emotional and practical support, none of which she’d offered Adeline when she was losing her mum. Lived in each other’s pockets at university. Then Adeline moved home to Margate. Or maybe it was Mars, for all Emily heard from her. What cannot be denied is that Emily knew what was happening.

They still haven’t talked about it.

Back to the Friendship section. On the shelf, along with the others in her arms, which one by one find their rightful place.

Eventually the bin empties, except for one. Occasionally this book gets lost, as if sometimes it doesn’t really belong here at all, or perhaps it goes upstairs. She doesn’t know what is up there. The staircase, glorious from distance, on closer inspection becomes full of holes and is too perilous to climb. A sign hangs across it, secured with two chains.

This section is off-limits.

This last book - she wishes it could be barred as well. She looks at the cover. It is a textbook that weighs heavy in her hands: LSD and the Sexual Appetite. She heads for Sexuality and nearly pushes it into place before stopping. She holds on, grips it tight. This one, she thinks, could be first.

She cannot face what the librarians from Better (Ltd) might make of it all. They would want coherence. They would reconfigure, streamline, impose sense. Perhaps they’d laugh at Wrong Shoes, gawp voyeuristically at LSD.

No good ruminating. She knows what she has to do.

These pages are so old, so dry, it won’t take a minute.

She removes the book from its plastic cover, carefully, despite herself, and drops the cover into the bin. She holds the book out in front of her, balanced, almost ceremonial. From her pocket she takes a lighter and turns it once or twice, as if her resolve needs kindling.

One flick of the thumb, and the book is alight.

She lets the flames take the pages, her smile flickering into being - until the book is fully taken. Her hand, too, almost goes in, before she casts loose the pages. They scatter, and fiery fragments drift over the frayed seats, a thousand loose threads waiting to catch light.

She considers how far it might travel. Whether it will reach The Garden of Eden. Whether the stairs will finally give way.

But she wants to survive this night. She retreats towards the doors, keeping her eyes on what is unfolding, and unlocks them. She departs, for the last time, into the night.

Outside, the smoke has not yet thickened enough to conceal what is happening. Through the window the fire can be seen, Childhood has been devoured, the rest to follow.

In only two minutes the entirety of the ground floor is alight. The stars disappear, replaced by the light thrown upward, a brightness that empties the sky. It happens as it has before - at the Cotton Library, in Copenhagen, in Alexandria - each time leaving a surrounding darkness, the unknown universe extinguished by the light of knowledge.

Smoke begins to engulf the first floor and the windows blacken. Emily sees the white dome dulling, deforming, no longer able to conceal what is happening. Burnt spots appear, spreading across its ageing faces. She clenches her fists - waits for it.

There is a crash. A rupture opens in the dome - fire breaks through, surging upward and outward, reaching the building’s highest point, where a fig-leaf weathervane stands, fixed but now falling.

Whatever lay on the first floor is gone - as Emily sees flames leaping from every open space in the library. Windows burst. The smoke shrouds her, stings, but she can’t move away, can’t not watch.

It will burn to the ground. Cauterise every shame she ever had.

She cannot say how long she stays, only that she watches as flame exhausts itself, red giving way to ember, until the library is reduced to a charred black skeleton. She waits for collapse. The books are finished, but the structures that held them persist.

She waits, but they don’t give way.

She waits, and the glowing doesn’t fade.

She moves closer and nudges one of the scorched supports with her foot. It holds. Something dislodges above and falls - she retreats.

Gradually, the sound changes. The crackle thins, replaced by a low, continuous hum.

The embers do not dim. They intensify.

The charred surface begins to separate, loosening, dropping to the ground like picked scabs. What falls does not land, it disappears. As the pieces begin to drop, Emily sees something beneath. Blue-white light emerges from the gaps: frozen, dazzling, and whirring.

What she had taken for concrete resolves into something harder. Enormous pipes solidify to form a luminous skeleton. A cage whose bars are conduits for some kind of light.

It was all supposed to burn down.

She approaches. Movement registers inside the light, brief shifts, small transmissions. As she draws nearer, images surface within the beams. The blue and white light rearranges itself. Unwillingly, she recognises what it holds.

The Wrong Shoes. Other images begin to form and she snaps her head away.

The last of the charred remains fall to the ground and seem to desiccate immediately, vanishing into something less than dust. What has risen in its place is this buzzing monument. Across the archway to the entrance, which seems less like a threshold than the entrance to infinity, words flash into being:

A Better (Ltd) Library

Emily watches, unable to reconcile what went before, with this thing unleashed. So bright, so without limit, as if it has no intention of relinquishing the night, or even, of allowing the light of other worlds to return.