/lit/ - Literature

Short Story Intro:
The camera in the library is gray and perches on a dusty metal strut twelve feet in the air, with its lens trained on the bare stucco wall between two bookshelves. From the back of its plastic casing runs three cables, one gray, one black, and one of a bright teal-ish color with a red streak that traces along its length. It lives (and so do I, to an increasing extent over the past few months of my investigation) on the third floor of the University of Texas library, and the two bookshelves between which its gaze is fixed contain the alphabetic Bo-’s, with bookshelf #1 going from Heinrich Böll to Jorge Borges, and bookshelf #2 from Herman Bosman to Kay Boyle. But the camera is not interested with these texts, these corpses. It is fascinated solely in the wall between them. It is also worth noting that the camera is utterly unremarkable as a piece of surveillance equipment. Nothing in its shape that would suggest the dread and confusion I have come to associate with it. In fact, it is a downright quant little gizmo. One of those obtrusive and boxy heist-movie relics, with a nose that turns sniffingly, a lens that sparkles like a spall of polished obsidian, and a gear that grinds loudly as it rotates so that there is no question of when you are (and when you aren’t) being monitored. Except that over the course of a semester of daily trips to the library I have never once seen the camera divert its attention from the barren wall, never once witnessed its nose swivel by an inch (with the exception of the two special occasions which marked the beginning and end of my vigil, the latter of which we may or may not get to in this journal, depending on how well I believe I have made my case and whether I feel that I can describe my observation without sounding psychotic). But yes, what I mean to say is that this particular camera, taken in a vacuum, is nothing to be concerned about. The object itself is not the source of my dread. It looks like a child’s toy. Cheap plastic, Made In China, not for use by children under the age of eight. Nor am I any kind of scopophobe. Not at all. I take selfies with my shirt off, I keep the flow of information on my twitter account regular, make sure my photos are tagged, and I sometimes walk through people’s family pictures on purpose, just because I like the idea of it. So what we have here is not a camera issue, and just to further illustrate this, let me take a moment to count how many of them are currently situated around me as write this (on a University-owned computer on floor two of the library, in a squeaky office chair, 11:55 PM Central Time—benighted windows, people sleeping, fluorescent lights dying overhead like workers in their cubicles, people speaking Japanese, people browsing Facebook, printers vomiting helpfully, incessantly, a librarian drinking coffee, keyboards chittering like jungle bugs, and the bleary-eyed security guard who I know is capable of terrible violence).

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First couple paragraphs of something.

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First paragraphs of a short story. Any critiques would be rad.