Osmosis

When she stepped into a library for the first time, the little girl instantly burst into sobs. The girl’s mother knelt down to her daughter’s level and took her face in her hands, catching teardrops with her calloused thumbs. “What could possibly be wrong, my sweet girl?” she said. “Isn’t this heaven?”

            The girl couldn’t explain past the tears that soaked into her words, expanding them until they were stuck in her throat on their journey to her lips, but if she could have paused it, she would have told her mother that it was simply too much. Too many books. Too many words. Too many stories for anyone to possibly experience in a lifetime, and, even for such a young girl, and with so many things left to call her brain home, she had already begun to grieve all the stories that she would leave behind, unhoused, once she was lowered into her grave.

            There was no shortage of attempts, however. Before even seeing the library, the girl had read the King James Bible cover to cover in eleven hours, and when her mother reminded her of that, she realized she might as well give it a go. With the reassurance of her ability lounging comfortably in her ear, the girl checked out twenty-three books that day, each one thick enough to stop a bullet, to see if she could chip any bit of stone off this mountainous endeavor. She read them all in one hundred seventy-nine (non-continuous; longest single stretch was fourteen) hours.

            In increasing numbers each visit, she checked out more. The librarian saw the girl enough times that when she went home, tired from a day of inhaling dust, and with Dewey decimal classifications dancing in her vision like rabid flies, she called her own daughter by the girl’s name. And yet, it was still never enough. The girl’s ravenous appetite for all things learned was still not satisfied, and it did not help that she had barely finished a shelf of books, in a library that had fifty-six shelves, on a planet that had hundreds of thousands of libraries. It was Sisyphean—a guy she had just learned about last week—and in spite of Camus, she was not happy about it.

            One day, a solution plopped into her head. She was reading a hand-me-down textbook, perversely annotated by its legions of prior owners, and found the definition for “osmosis,” as follows: movement of a solvent (such as water) through a semipermeable membrane (as of a living cell) into a solution of higher solute concentration that tends to equalize blah blah blah. She didn’t even finish reading the definition before she sprang up from her bed, ran to the kitchen, and found a roll of medical gauze. Her hands caught every book in her and her mother’s home, every book she had yet to read, and with them all in front of her, she began to take the gauze and wrap the books against her head. One after another, tome after tome, until she couldn’t see anything else in front of her other than binding leather. She sat on her bed, patiently waiting for the words to come to her; to seep into her brain.

            And they did. But not in such a gentle way. All the words flooded into her desperate mind with a final psychic gasp, as every book strapped to her head entered her mind at once.

            First came The Iliad, with its endless chronicle of heroes. Great Achilles, heels still fresh with wounds, found a space to call his own there, in the girl’s head. He stretched out his aching limbs, as did the many hundreds of Myrmidons gathered at his side, and with a sigh, Thetis’s son turned to the shade of Agamemnon. “Well, this is nice” he said. “Despite present company.”

            “Don’t grow so placid, Achilles,” said the broken king, “All this space will surely be gone in the coming hours.”

            And he was right on all counts but time, for, even if it felt like hours to the Greeks, it only took a thirtieth of a second for Ulysses to come next. Dublin clunked into the girl’s head with the weight of every brick and the force of every Irish boot, and very soon the weary Trojans breathed in the scents of the Liffey and its markets. Ajax sheathed his blade and ran his nose across bars of lemon soap, while Odysseus admired the quays.

            It all came so quickly, and with such a force, that soon there was nary any room left in the girl’s brain—there were simply too many worlds crammed within. All matters of pride, and of prejudice, and of crime, and of punishment, all somehow had to find a spot for themselves. For a time (that being three seconds) there was peace, as the March women put on a play for the Fellowship, and Fogg dragged Passepartout across the Arrakian sand, but there was simply not enough room to go around. The stories in the girl’s mind began to go to war for a place.

            The girl’s mother found her sprawled on the floor, a flurry of pages about her. The cry that shot from her mouth at the sight of her daughter, eyes wide and mind slowly dying, as the blades of a million armies slashed at each other within, was heard by the neighbors.

            In nine more seconds, the armies had found peace after their decades-long toil and, with their anger redirected, turned on their confines; they began to slash at the edges of the girl’s mind, hoping to widen it. In four more seconds, the armies found themselves breaking out, and all the stories in the girl’s head, all the tales she did not have the patience to absorb one at a time, began to pour out onto the carpet.

Nathaniel Kenny is a 20-year-old English and Philosophy major at SUNY New Paltz, where he’s been published in his school’s literary journal, the Stonesthrow Review. He loves reading any book or watching any movie he can get his hands on, especially when they’re read/watched while next to someone he loves.