An Episode of Remnants.

Episode Content Warnings

Please bear in mind that this work has content some listeners may find distressing, including themes of war, violence, and grief. This episode contains:

Vague allusions to child neglect

War, discussions of war, descriptions of indirect experiences at war

Cancer and cancer treatments, specifically osteosarcoma, with mentions of side effects and symptoms

Heavy discussion of life after limb amputation

Brief description of violent limb-loss resulting from a landmine

Discussions of frustration with inaccessibility

Experiences of breathing difficulty and pain

Experiences with morphine during late-stage cancer treatment

A character in distress at their spouse’s imminent passing

Transcript

APPRENTICE WAKES WITH A GASP AS DUST SETTLES AROUND HIM

APPRENTICE
Sir?

DUST SHIFTS AND MOVES. SOMETHING SCUTTLES.

APPRENTICE
Oh! You.

THE DUST SHIFTS AGAIN

APPRENTICE
You can do what he can do, right? Only. Different. That’s what you are, isn’t it? Like him, but different?

WHOOSH

SIR
Like who?

APPRENTICE YELPS

APPRENTICE
You scared me.

SIR
My apologies.

APPRENTICE
No, it’s– it’s fine.

SIR
Trying to commune with the dust, are you?

APPRENTICE
I don’t know.

SIR
Hmm.

APPRENTICE
Thanks for letting me rest.

SIR
I think I have been pushing you too hard.

APPRENTICE
Oh.

SIR
I confess, I am afraid.

APPRENTICE
Of what?

SIR
There was a time when you– when my Apprentice might last forty, sixty, a hundred remnants at a time. I would get him to read them and respond to them, and we would pour over the details together and finally I would ask him to judge them.

APPRENTICE
What happened?

SIR
I do not know. I am not a thing that knows.

APPRENTICE
I’m sorry.

SIR
I ought to be content, or not content, I suppose. I ought to be nothing at all. But. What you said to me before I made you read Flora Bradshaw was right. I am something. It is my own mistake. I wish I understood it. But I am not a thing that understands. I am a thing that processes remnants. And yet.

APPRENTICE
And yet. You didn’t want to tell me anything before. Now you’re saying all of this. Why?

SIR
You won’t last anyway. Why bother staying quiet?

APPRENTICE
I won’t… last?

SIR
Your time will be fleeting. Does it trouble you to know this?

APPRENTICE
I. I don’t. These remnants, these lives I’m reading. You say this where they end up, right? So. Even if my time here is fleeting, that’s okay, because I know this isn’t it. There’s Elsewhere.

SIR
Yes. But elsewhere is not here.

APPRENTICE
You don’t want me to be elsewhere?

SILENCE

APPRENTICE
Sir… why is it so important to you that I read these remnants?

SIR
So that I can be certain.

APPRENTICE
About what?

SIR
About you.

APPRENTICE
What do you need to be certain about?

SIR
I just told you.

APPRENTICE
No, I mean. Why aren’t you certain already? If the problem is that you don’t know me well enough, maybe instead of getting me to read all these other people’s lives, you should ask me about my own.

SIR
Do you remember it?

APPRENTICE
No.

SIR
There we are, then.

APPRENTICE
Why don’t I remember it?

SIR
By design, in part. A mistake. A mistake.

APPRENTICE
Can’t you just fix it? If it’s a mistake, you can like, materialise and stuff, so–

SIR
No. It cannot be fixed.

APPRENTICE
Why?

SIR
It can’t.

APPRENTICE
Okay. Well, maybe you should just try, like, talking to me more or something, ask me questions get to know me.

SIR
You are a liar.

APPRENTICE
What?

SIR
You’re a liar!

APPRENTICE
I– I don’t, I didn’t–

SIR
No, no, it is part of what intrigues me, I think. Alas, we must go on, and there is only one way forward, I am afraid.

APPRENTICE
Reading more remnants.

SIR
Yes, indeed. Here. I have brought one for you.

APPRENTICE
A typewriter? Where did that even–?

Never mind.

FOOTSTEPS

APPRENTICE
It’s old, worn. Some of the letters on the keys are barely visible. When I press them there’s just the right amount of resistance— ah!

WHOOSH

Dafydd – mud-streaked, breathless – stops just short of the pointy-roofed entrance to the library. It’s starting to rain, and there’s a smell on the air that makes him certain it’s about to get a lot worse.

Dafydd’s friend, Ted, skids around the corner, losing his footing in his mud-slick boots, stopping himself from falling with his hands.

They cant’t get out of the rain at Dafydd’s house because his mum is busy cutting a new dress for one of the ladies up town and there’s bits all over the house. She won’t put it away all until it goes dark and if Dafydd comes in muddy she’ll go spare. And they can’t go to Ted’s because they never go into Ted’s house. They don’t talk about it, but Dafydd knows Ted is scared of his aunt, and Dafydd is scared of Ted’s older cousins.

Recovered from his fall, Ted catches up with Dafydd, breathing fast. ‘In here?’ says Ted, glaring up at the building.

‘Yeah. It’s free,’ says Dafydd. He hops up the stairs and Ted follows him. Dafydd tugs on the wooden door; it creaks as it opens. Ted gives a small, odd look, then steps inside.

It’s quiet in the library. Dafydd makes a big show of wiping his boots on the huge doormat. Ted copies him, bending over to try to get rid of some of the mud splatters on his calves, succeeding only in smearing them about.

At the big, pine desk near the front, the librarian pauses the clacking at her typewriter. She glances up from what she’s doing as Dafydd and Ted walk in.

Ted wraps his arms around his chest, making himself as small as he can, smiling at the librarian, moving closer to Ted as they walk past her.

‘It’s okay, we’re allowed,’ says Dafydd.

The library is small, but there’s a whole shelf of children’s books at the back. He takes Ted there first. They stand, looking over the closed volumes. Neither of them can read well, though, and without his mother pointing at the spines, Dafydd suddenly feels stupid and self-conscious. Most of the books only have pictures on a few of their pages anyway, the stories are rubbish without someone to read them to you. The librarian is nice but it’s not her job to read stories to little boys, Dafydd’s mother says.

The clack of the librarian’s typewriter keys resume as Dafydd walks Ted between the bookshelves.

Dafydd leads him along the library’s back wall, to the section where they keep the biggest texts. These ones have loads of words, too, and they’re really tiny. But they also have big, weird pictures. When he came with mum last week there was a drawing of a man with all is skin peeled off so you could see his muscles. It was disgusting.

On another pages there was a picture of a load of wiggly lines and a big blob in the middle, and the lines sort of made a person shape, like a freaky ghost made up of the branches of trees in winter, when all their leaves have fallen off. Dafydd’s mother told him those were veins and they’re secretly inside of everyone’s body and its how the blood gets around. Dafydd thought that was gross but also really cool, even if he doesn’t understand how all of that and a skeleton can fit in one person.

He explains all this to Ted in a whisper as they walk over to the shelf. Ted, who is usually pretty chatty when it’s just the two of them, is really quiet as they walk over to the shelf with the big books on it. He keeps looking over at the librarian, nervous. He reminds Dafydd of his dog, Gwyn, when he’s stolen a sandwich; he knows someone is about to shout at him at any moment.

Dafydd picks out a book at random. It’s too heavy to lift so he just sets it on the ground in front of himself. Ted doesn’t sit on the carpet next to Dafydd, he bends over and does an awkward sort of squat.

‘What’s the matter?’ says Dafydd.

‘Got no money,’ says Ted.

‘Doesn’t matter. It doesn’t cost anything,’ says Dafydd.

Ted doesn’t look convinced. Dafydd flips the book open, revealing a page of delicate sketches of a dandelion. He glances up at Ted. He’s staring at the page.

‘You’re allowed to look at the book without buying it?’ says Ted.

Dafydd nods. ‘You can even take them home.’

‘For free?’

‘Yeah,’ says Dafydd.

Ted chews his lip. He sits down next to Dafydd. ‘Show me?’

WHOOSH

Dafydd is watching the clouds. They look like a cotton ball half-pulled apart.

‘They’re getting there guns out,’ says the boy lying next to Dafydd on. They’re in the sand dunes a little way down from the holiday camp. For the last few months, its been the home of hundreds of trainee soldiers. Nearly every day, Dafydd’s friends have come down the dunes and laid in the grasses to watch them.

Dafydd rolls onto his front. Until today, the recruits have been carrying around gun-shaped bits of wood. When he told his mother about this, she said that the boys at the holiday camp must be disappointed. ‘They’re taking over all sorts of fancy big houses for the war effort. Reckon I’d be gutted if I thought I was getting Bodelwyddan Castle and I ended up here.’

Dafydd thought it was a pretty odd thing to say, because he’s pretty sure most of the people signing up to go to war aren’t thinking about the house they’ll stay in whilst they’re still in Britain. They’re probably thinking about all the stuff that comes after, or they would be if they had any sense.

Dafydd has started reading Wilfred Owen at the library. He’d gone in to ask the librarian about war. He’d heard all about it on the radio. The librarian said the best way to learn about war was to read about it, and she found him a book of Wilfred Owen, and she’d read a couple of the poems out loud.

Dafydd was getting okay at reading; if he takes his time and follows along with his finger, he can work out most of what things say.

Ted was learning way faster than Dafydd, before he went to see his dad in London. Before he left, he said he would be back in a week, but it’s been months now. Months and months. Dafydd’s heard about bombs in London. But they’re also sending children to the countryside. Ted’s probably fine, his mother said. Better for being out of his aunt’s house, anyway.

Dafydd supposes that’s probably true. Still, he misses his friend, and everyone else is really excited by the soldiers but Dafydd just thinks about the poems and the mud and what he hears about on the radio.

‘I hope the war goes on long enough for me to sign up,’ says one of the boys. He’s nearly seven.

The thought of a war going on for ten whole years makes Dafydd sick to his stomach. He gets up out of the grass and marches home to help his mum with the tailoring instead.

WHOOSH

Manchester feels massive, epic, to Dafydd. There’s movement everywhere. He’s glad he came here, not to the sleepy towns where Oxford and Cambridge are tucked away down south. The bustle of this big, dirty city feels like it’s something Dafydd has been looking for all his life.

And the libraries! Oh the libraries. The John Rylands, Chetham’s Library, Central Library. The University where he’s studying has its own library too. There are so many books that it would take Dafydd lifetimes to read them all. The thought of it delights and horrifies him. He wants to read every word, drink it in, perfectly file it away in his mind. But he can’t. There’s too many, and he’s just one Dafydd.

There are other reasons Dafydd likes Manchester. The University is old, every bit as questionable an institution as any other big academic body in Britain. They’re all part of the empire, they’re all part of a structure of power. But Manchester is a working city. There’s a thoughtless, pell-mell feeling to the way its streets are put together. The whole thing is full of these behemoth Victorian beauties, vast factories and mills where hundreds of people worked themselves to the bone, where children were crushed by machines, where immigrants threaded needles until their finger prints wore away.

Karl Marx, who wrote the Communist Manifesto, had spent huge amounts of time in Manchester before he did so. Dafydd heard one of the boys from his seminar talking about it at the pub.

He was upper class, from somewhere down south. Dafydd wasn’t entirely sure, but it sounded like he’d tried to get into Cambridge and hadn’t made the cut.

This boy, with his Kentish accent, seemed to love that Marx had come to Manchester, cited it as a reason that the city ought to be proud.

At this thought, Dafydd couldn’t help himself.

‘Yeah, but he didn’t like it! He thought it was horrible. He saw this city as something scarred, as a place where people were being exploited, and he was right.’

‘Oh you would say that,’ said the boy.

It had escalated and escalated, until they were going to take their argument outside.

But as Dafydd braced himself to be punched, he leaned back, and felt an excruciating pain in his leg. It was like nothing he’d ever felt before. He’d fallen to the ground, curled on his side, shouting in agony.

And now here he is, sitting in the hospital, waiting for someone to tell him what’s wrong. When he had the leg x-rayed last night, they said he’d snapped his femur, but that can’t be right. All he did was stand there. Femurs are big, thick bones; Dafydd has read about how hard they are to snap. He’s seen diagrams in textbooks. Femurs don’t just break when you’re standing there, so it has to be a mistake.

A nurse brings him a cup of tea. She stays at his bedside. They chatter about the NHS, about where she trained, about how her dad died in the war.

Dafydd drops off to sleep after that. He’s been a little tired for a few weeks, but he’s just started University, and everything is exciting and new, so that’s to be expected. His leg’s been sore from all the walking around, but that’s all it is. It must be. It’s daft that they won’t let him stand on it, that this morning they were talking about surgery to pin the bones back together, but they needed an expert to look at the x-rays first.

Surgery for a sore leg. It all feels rather daft, to Dafydd.

He wakes in the early afternoon. A different nurse brings him tea, chatters with him about her pet parrot, who she is trying to teach to speak because at the moment the only sound it mimics is the doorbell, and she’s hoping if she can teach him more to say, it’ll save her a lot of trips to the front door.

The doctor comes in a little later. His expression is grave.

Dafydd’s leg really did snap. It snapped because he has osteosarcoma, a kind of cancer that is eating his bones. To save his life, they’ll be amputating the leg from the hip tomorrow morning.

Dafydd sits in silence. In the evening, a nurse brings him a cup of tea. She asks how he is. He doesn’t answer.

WHOOSH

‘Do you know how chemotherapy was discovered?’ Dafydd asks, as a nurse hooks up his IV.

‘I don’t,’ says the nurse, with an indulgent smile.

‘It was an accident, actually. During the first world war, there was widespread use of mustard gas. Afterwards, when they were treating soldiers who’d been attacked with it, they discovered they all had very low white blood cell counts. And this became the founding principle behind modern cancer treatment, which we call chemotherapy.’

‘Fascinating,’ says the nurse, like she might actually mean it. She finishes setting up Dafydd’s infusion and leaves him alone in his room.

His mother will come to visit this evening, but now he’ll spend the day alone.

He’s back in Wales, has been since a month after they took his leg.

The stump is short. It’s covered in scars. He’ll never be able to wear a prosthetic.

It keeps occurring to him and occurring to him how many of the places he loves have so many stairs to get into them. He’ll have to climb his way into so many libraries on his hands and remaining knee.

He’s been reading about soldiers coming back from the war with terrible injuries, lost limbs, movement-limiting scars. He read an account of a man standing on a landmine, the utter horror as he flew through the air, how that horror reached out and onwards as he looked down, saw his own limb tethered to him only by the inseam of his trousers.

All Dafydd did was stand there and his leg snapped.

He tries not to think about it.

His mother has bought him a typewriter. It’s old, heavy, clearly second hand, but oddly beautiful despite its battered state. ‘So you can keep working on your essays,’ she says. ‘I know how tired you’ve been. I thought this would save you having to write by hand.’

Dafydd has not used it once. The typewriter is too big for the tiny overbed desk he has in this hospital room, so it sits on the floor by the visitor’s chair. He can’t get out of bed by himself. Even if his wheelchair was close enough, he’s too weak to hold himself on his arms long enough. He wouldn’t be able to lift the typewriter even if he could get to it.

Instead he lies there, staring at it on the floor.

Logically, he knows the bone would never have healed. If they’ve left his leg, the cancer would have kept eating and eating through it, until it was all over him. He’d probably be dead already, he’s read about it, he’s pretty sure.

Now he’s doing this chemo to kill off any cancer that might have been sneaking around elsewhere. Just in case.

It makes him ache that he’ll never know if he needed this. Every time he’s sick, every time he catches his reflection, with his bald head, inflamed skin, puffy eyes, he wonders if there was even any cancer left for these drugs to kill.

There’s just no way to know.

At least if Dafydd had trodden on a landmine he’d have known when it was over.

WHOOSH

Dafydd looks up from his book. The girl sitting a few tables away from him dramatically tosses her head, looking out of the large windows.

Dafydd turns his attention back to his notes. He has a spread of books in front of him, and his little notebook. He’s mapping out a plan for his dissertation, or at least, he’s supposed to be doing that. The topics he’s been making notes on have been way too broad and so far his listed outline looks like the index page for a poor imitation of the Communist Manifesto.

He’s chewing his poor pencil to bits as he mulls over what he’s written, a twelve page critique on Marx and Engel’s failure to consider the disabled and disfigured experience in their work, but how they simultaneously provide a framework to systemically address iniquities through placing the onus of failure on society, rather than the individual.

The fact Dafydd only has one leg would still be complicated for him on a personal level even if he could get into the library without needing help, but it would make his life significantly easier if someone had thought about the fact that someone with a wheelchair might like to get into the library, actually.

Dafydd huffs. This is not useable material for his dissertation. He’s not really sure why he’s so stressed; the deadline to turn in his proposal isn’t for a month, yet, and he won’t need to hand the finished thing in for two semesters.

He looks up, gazing miserably across the room, chewing his pencil.

The girl two tables down is staring at him. When he catches her, she looks away again, sharply.

Dafydd sighs. He runs his hand over his head, over the frazzled curls which have grown in over the months since he finished chemo. He’d insisted all summer he was well enough to go back to school. He’s twenty-two, he ought to have graduated by now, and clawing his way through his second year by post was agonising, as flattered as he was that the university had accommodated him. If he leaves it any longer, he’ll never finish, he figures.

Honestly, though, it is exhausting to be back in the city. He’s living in halls with students four years his junior, fresh out of their mother’s homes or private schools, barely able to look after themselves, still finding their feet.

It’s hard enough for Dafydd without his mother’s help, let alone with the raging sounds of a bunch of eighteen year olds having a wonderful time down the hallway.

He’s just so tired. Since chemo, he feels like his brain has slowed down. That’s why he can’t nail his dissertation down, it’s why he–

‘Excuse me, you’re Dafydd, aren’t you?’

The girl from two tables down is standing over Dafydd, looking nervous.

‘That’s me,’ he says.

The girl half-smiles. She’s clutching a large book to her chest. ‘You’re in my modern thinkers module, aren’t you?’

Dafydd considers for a moment. ‘Oh, yeah, I am. Abigail, isn’t it?’

‘Abi,’ she says. ‘Sorry I– you’re older, aren’t you?’

Dafydd sits straighter. ‘A little.’

‘I started studying at twenty-one, so.’ She shrugs.

Dafydd cocks his head slightly sideways. ‘Right?’

‘Oh, I was just wondering. You know. Maybe we could grab a drink, or something? Older students alliance.’

Dafydd cracks a smile. ‘Sure.’

Abi smiles, too. She holds her book a little tighter. She’s blushing. ‘Great.’

WHOOSH

Dafydd runs his finger along Abi’s spine and she sighs, twisting her pillow closer to her face. Her back is a very pretty back, he decides. He traces the lines between her freckles, marking out constellations.

‘I’m tired,’ Abi grumbles into her pillow.

‘If you don’t get up now you won’t have time to shower.’

‘I don’t care,’ says Abi.

‘Do you want to be stinky on your first day?’

Abi moans. ‘But I like bed.’

‘I know you like bed,’ says Dafydd. ‘You also like having money to buy nice things. So you want to do good on your first day at the library.’

Abi sighs. She peers out from under the pillow. ‘Maybe I don’t need more nice things. I have bed, I have you. That’s all I need.’

Dafydd hums. ‘I don’t know, you seem really into those fancy chocolates. And the shoes you saw in that shop window in town the other day.’

‘The yellow ones,’ says Abi, miserably.

‘Which would look lovely with your blue dress.’

‘Oh, they would,’ she sighs. ‘And I need to work because of my lay about husband and his stupid Master’s degree.’

Dafydd tries to keep his smile on. He knows Abi’s just teasing, but she had wanted to keep studying too. But the reality was they couldn’t afford for both of them to not be working, and it was exceptionally hard for Dafydd to get a job. They’ve told him he might be able to start picking up some teaching hours in his second semester, but there’s no guarantee.

Abi was upset. But she’d seen how hard Dafydd had tried to find work. There were just so few places he could literally get into. He worked at the cinema for a few weeks, but he couldn’t get into some of the back rooms because of the steps. He can’t pick up bar work; there’s no space for his chair. Almost all the libraries have too many staircases.

He hates that this ripples outwards. That she can’t study because he can’t work enough. That he needs to rely on her this way. It’s not fair.

Abi, sighing huffily, gets herself up. She walks naked across the room, crashes into something and yelps.

‘This bloody typewriter!’ she yelps, clutching her toes. ‘You never even use it! Does it even work?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why do we still have it?! It takes up so much room, and if your crutches get caught, then—’

‘Mother got it for me when I was sick,’ says Dafydd

Abi sighs. ‘Right.’

She continues on her way to the bathroom without further argument. She doesn’t like to talk about when Dafydd was sick. She’s good to Dafydd, has never seemed to think less of him despite there being literally less of him than there used to be. She helps him with things he can’t do himself without really thinking about it, expects only things Dafydd can really do in return. She listens when he’s frustrated, holds him when he cries. But she won’t talk let him talk about when he was sick.

In the bathroom, Abi gets into before the water turns hot and squeals under the cold stream, just like she does every time she showers.

Dafydd sighs. He rolls onto his back, looks up at the ceiling in their little flat, on the ground floor of a tiny terraced house. The landlord built him a little ramp to get through the front door in his chair, out of plywood. It’s not ideal, but it will do.

Abi breezes into the room, buttoning up her polkadot blouse. She kisses Dafydd on the head. ‘Don’t think too hard today and wear yourself out,’ she says, winking.

‘Get lost,’ he calls after her.

‘See you later!’

The door opens, slams shut. Dafydd hears Abi’s heels click-clacking down the street as she hurries towards the bus stop.

WHOOSH

Dafydd segues into wakefulness. It always feels like a slow slide, now, like he never quite gets there. He never quite gets to sleep, either. He ebbs closer and further from both.

He coughs. Pain bursts like fireworks through his ribs.

‘Are you hurting?’ asks Abi.

Dafydd hums.

‘Darling you have to tell me, do you need more morphine?’

Dafydd peels open his eyes and is surprised to find the room is bright. It’s afternoon, he thinks, the way that the sun is coming through the window. His mother is there, drinking tea. Abi is leaning over him, rubbing his arm.

‘Tell me what you need?’ says Abi.

‘Morphine,’ he says.

Abi nods. He hears her go off to the kitchen.

‘How are you feeling, love?’ asks his mother.

Dafydd nods. ‘Tired.’

‘You were tired last time, too,’ says his mother.

This is different to last time, though. They both know it.

He’s surprised by how fast it’s all happened. It was only a couple of months ago, the coughing had started. He’d written it off as a virus at first, but it hadn’t shifted. He went for an x-ray. His lungs were full of dense, white clouds.

The cancer was back. It had been back for years, but he hadn’t known it. Lung metastasis. Stage four. There was nothing they could do.

Abi comes back with his morphine. He’d worried how she would be, given her reticence to talk about his sickness before it came back.

‘It felt too much like I was willing it to do this to you,’ she whispered. ‘Even acknowledging that it had happened, I don’t know. It made the possibility it would happen again too real, and it scared me.’

Abi sits down next to Dafydd on their little sofa, curls her legs up under herself and puts her head on Dafydd’s shoulder.

‘I brought you some books,’ says Dafydd’s mother.

Dafydd smiles. ‘Thanks,’ he says. His eyes are closed again. His drifting.

She starts to tell him what they’re about, but he’s drifted too far off to make out the words now.

When he next drifts back to himself things are different. There’s something on his face, a mask instead of the tube he’d had before. There’s beeping, and a sound of something awful, like someone shaking a bag full of coins and bits of old wood.

That’s him, he realises distantly. That’s the sound of him breathing.

Abi is squashed up on the narrow hospital bed beside him. She’s talking, slow and calm, but she’s crying too, sobbing. She’s holding Dafydd’s hand tight in both of hers. He can’t move his fingers.

He thinks about the freckles on her back.

Let’s get married, she’s saying, let’s have ten children, move to the countryside. She’s begging him, begging.

He thinks of her yellow heels, navy dress, red lipstick. He thinks of the freckles on her back. He thinks of her looking at him, nervous, clutching a book to her chest.

Be a professor, she’s telling him, be a grumpy old professor. Be grey haired and crotchety and beloved by all your students even though they’re terrified of you. Be a politician. Change the world.

Dafydd thinks of her unbuttoning her dress in front of him, just out of reach. How she let it drop to the floor. Middle of the afternoon, soft golden light filtered through the closed blinds, her skin glowed. Freckles on the beautiful expanse of her back. Naked. Hand on his body, over his skin, he could have drowned in her.

Abi is still talking. She’s saying your mother’s brought your typewriter for you. Use it, for her, won’t you? Just wake up enough to use it. Writer her a letter. Write me a letter. Give me that, at least. Please. Please write me a letter or make it to Tuesday. Make it to tomorrow. Make it through the night. Hold my hand. Please hold my hand.

Secret picnics on the hill above town. Watching the clouds as the soldiers did their target practice. Whip stitching seams for his mother. Hanging fabric out to dry, the floral soap smell clinging to his fingers. Books and books and books. Freckles on Abi’s back like constellations mapped right into her skin. Galaxies inside her. Multitudes. Clouds like pulled cotton over blue silk. Finger tracking over the words. Clack clack clack of the librarian’s typewriter as he sits in the corner, with a book in his lap.

WHOOSH

THE APPRENTICE IS FURIOUS, UPSET

APPRENTICE
Why did you show me that?

SIR
Did you not want to see it?

APPRENTICE
He never used it.

SIR
Was the point that it he would use it?

APPRENTICE
Wh– what was the point at ALL.

SIR
I… I’m sorry.

APPRENTICE
I don’t care that you’re sorry! I don’t care that you don’t understand and you don’t know! A- actually, that makes it worse. This isn’t fair, what you’re doing! It’s not fair.

SIR
No. No it is not.

APPRENTICE
What’s the difference between shelve and discard?

SIR
What?

APPRENTICE
Shelve! Discard! The question, what’s the difference?!

SIR
You know more than you ought to know.

APPRENTICE
What is the difference between them, Sir? Shelve, discard! That’s the question!

SIR
ENOUGH.

APPRENTICE GASPS

SIR
Go to sleep.

THE APPRENTICE SIGHS

SIR
You know more than you ought to know, Apprentice.

How is that so, I wonder?

DUST SHIFTS

SIR
I have heard enough from you. Leave me be.

DUST SHIFTS MORE LOUDLY

SIR
LEAVE ME BE.

DUST CONTINUES TO SHIFT

SIR
Let me keep him. Please, won’t you let me keep him.

DUST CONTINUES TO SHIFT

SIR
I know how it will go, in the end. The way they always do. But please. Not yet.

DUST CONTINUES TO SHIFT

SIR
I am not a thing that knows why.

DUST SHIFTS MORE LOUDLY

SIR
I cannot let him go. Just a while longer.

DUST SHIFTS EVEN MORE

END.

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