In My Defence

The shelf was empty. Alarmed, I checked atop drawers and desks; the kitchen bench; the arms of chairs in the living room; in backpacks and cupboards. Nothing. I sifted dirt in the backyard, climbed the lemon tree to scan the horizon, pawed through the dimness behind the couch. The books had gone.   

I crept to the back shed. It was the last place they might expect me to look. Inside, I witnessed the final stages of a mutiny, a scene from Jacques-Louis David’s The Tennis Court Oath. From the disparate territories of my house, dozens of unfinished books had united. Their common grievance—the oppression of bookmarks jammed into their middles, the dust gathering on their jackets—eclipsed traditionally divisive differences of form, genre and epoch. The fluttering of their pages spelled revolt.