The librarian who filled souls

 

Experimental Short Story Series #42
Title: “The Librarian Who Filed Souls”
By Faraz Parvez (Pen name of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal, Former Faculty Member, Umm Al Qura University, Makkah, KSA)

Welcome back, dear readers, to another surreal stop in our journey through the genre-bending landscape of experimental short fiction. With this 42nd installment of our celebrated 60-Story Experimental Series, we invite you to wander the shadowed corridors of memory, myth, and metaphysics—this time, within the crumbling walls of a library that archives more than knowledge. It preserves the soul.

This tale isn’t just a story—it’s a question wrapped in parchment, filed under “E” for eternity.

The Librarian Who Filed Souls

The city no longer remembered his name.
Not in its maps, not in its census, not even in the graffiti that bloomed like moss over rusted benches. But there he was—thin, owl-eyed, and silent, gliding between oakwood shelves in a library that time had forgotten. Some whispered he came with the mortar. Others swore he never aged.

The library’s smell was ancient—damp leather, brittle ink, candle ash, and something else: something like nostalgia after it's soured.

He was the only librarian, and he kept two catalogs.

One for books.
And one... for souls.

It began with Anisha.
A teenager with an eye for stories and a laugh too loud for the reading room. She came looking for escape from the rain—and from her stepmother’s heavy sighs. But what she found was a corridor no one had noticed before. Narrow. Dusty. Lined with drawers not labelled by author or genre, but by names.

Names like hers.
Anisha T. Banerjee. Filed under: Potential Departures.

She froze. The drawer creaked when she opened it.

Inside:

  • A yellowed slip of parchment
  • A date of death (a future one)
  • And a small, pressed flower... still breathing

She confronted the librarian, trembling.
He looked up—slowly. Eyes grey like winter morning fog.

“You’ve read too far ahead,” he said. “Most don’t.”

“What is this? Why is my name there? Why do you have that date?”

The librarian shut the drawer gently, like sealing a casket. “Every visitor leaves something behind. Their presence. Their essence. Some call it aura. Others call it data. I file what matters. And what matters,” he added, “is rarely visible.”

“But I’m still alive.”

“For now.”

The city library had always been more than just walls and books.
It had witnessed revolutions, births, suicides, and stolen kisses in the poetry aisle. It remembered everything—even what its visitors preferred to forget.

Anisha returned the next day. And the next.
She began to volunteer. Dusting shelves. Logging visitors. Peeking into drawers when the librarian wasn’t looking.

Until one evening, she found his drawer.

Empty.

Except for a single word:

“Curator.”

And then... the librarian vanished.

Some say he retired. Others claim Anisha absorbed him.

But now, a teenage girl with owl-eyes and a silence too heavy for her age moves through the stacks.

Visitors still come.
Stories are still borrowed.
And the second catalog—
Now it glows.

Why This Story Matters

Because we all leave traces behind.
Because memory is more than recollection—it’s architecture.
And perhaps, the buildings we ignore are watching us back, taking notes, archiving echoes.

This story dares to ask: What if the soul isn’t something you lose… but something you file?

Join Us on the Journey

With “The Librarian Who Filed Souls,” we mark our 42nd milestone in this pioneering blog series. Each tale is a tribute to the experimental, the uncanny, the intimate, and the infinite.

As always, we thank you—our loyal readers across the world—for turning up, tuning in, and journeying through ink and imagination with us.

Keep reading. Keep wondering. And don’t forget:
You may already be catalogued.

Stay with us as we inch closer to our goal of 60 unforgettable experimental short stories—soon to be compiled into a special digital and hardcopy collection.

Only on farazparvez1.blogspot.com
Where fiction folds reality, one blog at a time.

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