By Charles M. Sumid     Copyright 2025     Written 2013

Six-thirty. Winter dark arrives. She keeps
a roll of quarters in her cardigan pocket,
feeds the meters along Oak Street
before anyone gets ticketed.

The yoga instructor’s Honda,
the night student’s rust-eaten Ford,
the barista who stays late cleaning.
She knows their cars like children,
their expired hopes blinking red.

The library closes at eight.
By eight-fifteen, Mrs. Watanabe
has dimmed the overheads,
leaving only the reading lamps
like small moons over empty tables.

She selects tonight’s book:
Where the Wild Things Are,
worn soft at the corners
from forty years of small hands.

“Let the wild rumpus start!”
she reads to the stacks,
her voice filling spaces
between Shakespeare and Steinbeck.

The books seem to lean in,
old friends remembering
when they too were chosen, held,
their stories spoken into waiting air.

In Reference, she stops
at the atlas shelf, runs her finger
along the Pacific, finding the island
where her father was born,
where no one reads to empty rooms
because empty rooms still hold the war.

She closes the atlas gently,
returns to the circulation desk.
Tomorrow they’ll find
her reading glasses there,
wonder why she stays so late.

They won’t notice the meters
paid through morning,
or the book in Children’s Literature—
Goodnight Moon—
standing slightly forward on its shelf,
spine tilted just enough
to suggest it heard her whisper
“Goodnight nobody,” and smiled.