How to Escape Retirement

If you were to hold a knife to her throat and demand she confess to at least one grievance, Yuan would say the dragons—especially the old ones who never bothered to keep up with the times and expected to be spoon-fed answers from books. She doubted they knew how to read, never mind how to extrapolate an extinction-preventing solution from historical references. They’d barge in, demand a stack of books, empty the entire dragon section, and for whatever reason, proceed to take out the entire ‘D’ shelves, from dads to dungeons, too. And still, the dragons met their demise via some hero or rogue volcano without returning her books or paying the fines.

But that was if you were to hold a knife to Yuan’s neck. She considered herself quite level-headed and zen for the most part, even when it came to the bureaucratic rules she had to follow to continue receiving funds for books, tablets, 3D printers, and soundproof walls. Besides the elderly dragons, nothing truly irritated Yuan. Truly. Not the fox god who’d tried to sprout rice in her pots of succulents. Not the nuclear lab government contractor who kept asking for free access to JSTOR. Not the ex-Olympic figure skater who insisted she’d moved on yet practiced jumps on land when she thought no one was watching. Not even the mountain goat who’d torn through her remaining encyclopedia hard copies proudly showcased behind her desk.

“You know, at times I feel like a piece of tape trying to keep everything together. But tape is easily replaceable, right?” Yuan told the black hole who visited quite frequently for no particular reason Yuan could discern.

“If you’re tape, you’d be duct tape,” the black hole said.

“Duct tape is easily replaced.”

“That doesn’t make it any less useful.”

“Maybe I should retire,” Yuan mused. She’d saved enough in her 401k, and she still had her fully paid off house in that tiny neighborhood surrounded by palm trees and strawberry plants. She could probably get by on very little; she didn’t need a big budget for travel or luxury items, just enough to buy eggs and cabbages and onions. And some madras curry powder, too. That stuff made everything taste good. She’d need to care for her parents, but they had savings of their own, too.

“I think I could really do it,” Yuan contemplated.

“You can’t quit without finding and training a replacement though,” the black hole replied. “Two weeks’ notice.”

“Yeah yeah,” she replied.

Two days later, Yuan failed to show up at the library. The sign-in sheet was still set to the previous date, scrawled on and wrinkled. The return drop had overflowed and books began to pile up on the floor. The local witch who visited monthly for the latest potion formula editions left empty-handed, unable to find the book, unable to poison young princesses who’d long since grown immune to her original concoctions. The Warring States Period army defectors ended up taking refuge in the children’s section where they gorged on a large jug of Starbursts and hard milk candies. The computers, Ethernet cables, hard drives, and printers were all stolen within the first hours. Those who could not live without reading dumped books into their suitcases and bottomless purses and potato sacks, lugging them home in a hurry. The black hole, who’d frequented the library for Yuan’s company and the occasional book snack or two when Yuan wasn’t watching, found no reason to continue visiting. As days turned into weeks into months, the library grew more and more empty until the only presence left was a budding peach tree of immortality. Its roots had begun to grow through the hardwood floor, cracking through planks and spreading to the carpeted rooms, upending the ground there, too.

But the tree would take millennia to bear fruit of any practical use. Immortality trees were slow and patient like that. The final stragglers of the library—three fruit-fanatic pixies who cared more for nectarines than peaches—eventually abandoned the tree as well. “If the tree grows, it grows. If it dies, it dies,” they said, finally fed up with waiting.

Meanwhile, Yuan had retreated to a new construction townhome surrounded by bustling young people going in and out to make important meetings or happy hours or socials or new restaurant openings. She set up a small desk by the window of her study room with bamboo placemats and ceramic coasters. She hung a small calendar on the wall right above her monitor, although the calendar was two months behind, and she was too lazy to rip off the outdated pages and deliver them to the recycling bin. She kept a small shelf of books: How to be Successful as a Woman in Tech, The Stock Market for Dummies, a collection of translated Chinese poems she never had the energy to interpret. Not that she read any of these old gifts her parents bought her thinking just because she liked to read, she’d read anything.

Yuan invited her parents to visit. She hadn’t had them over since they retired, and now that she’d effectively retired too, it seemed like the right time. When her mom picked up the phone, Yuan could hear the tearful yelling, “Yuan Yuan is on the phone! Hurry up, Yuan Yuan is here”, and the hurried, heavy slaps of dad’s slippers grow louder over the speaker.

“Do you finally have a family?” they asked her, eager. Would they not visit if she didn’t?

“Not quite,” Yuan had replied.

“Ah, then a child is on the way, or in the works?”

“Mmmmmm,” Yuan mumbled, looking out the window, spotting a changeling bundled in cloth, laying outside on the doorstep. “Kind of.” She held the phone between her shoulder and ear as she walked toward the door and opened it to the changeling. It had rhombus-shaped eyes, sawtooth-like teeth, tiny slits on the sides of its neck like gills. “So when do you want to visit?”

“Maybe next month. We’re visiting your cousin who miscarried last month. Her parents can’t make it across the country so we’re checking up on them instead. See, this is what happens when you try to have a baby too late.”

“Let me know, I’ll buy your flight tickets.”

After hanging up the call, Yuan stared at the changeling. These types of things used to show up all the time in front of her desk while she was trying to organize the next year’s book catalog.

“This isn’t a library,” she told the changeling, placing a Rockit apple in its arms as an offering and shutting the door. 

The next day, it was a White Tiger prowling by her porch. She tossed the fattiest slice of braised pork out the window, sending the tiger running.

The following day, it was a walking Venus flytrap, then a restaurant server robot, then a cluster of high-energy neutrinos. When the black hole finally turned up, Yuan placed one hand on her hip and rubbed her temple with the other.

“I thought retirement was supposed to be peaceful,” she lamented.

The black hole swirled under her gaze, sheepishly trying to dodge her glares. “Well,” it began. “The space-time continuum seems to have cracked.”

“Cracked?” she echoed.

“Just a tiny part of it,” the black hole quickly added. “A super tiny part. Almost unnoticeable.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“The source of the crack seems to be the library.”

“Is that supposed to be my problem?” Yuan asked, unfazed. In fact, she was surprised it took this long for a crack in the space-time continuum to show up. The library hadn’t been the newest of constructions, running on its last leg of a plumbing system and operating within a structure that cackled and shrieked during monsoon season.

“No, but…” the black hole trailed off. “Cracks don’t tend to lead to good things.”

Yuan sighed. “You’re just afraid there’ll be no more wayward stars leftover for you to rip apart.”

“The light shows are so dramatic, so extraordinary though,” it defended. “You’ll never be able to see that kind of thing again if all the dimensions get pulverized together.”

“Look, I’m done with this. You’ll need to find someone else to figure this out.”

Yuan shut the door. During the two weeks the black hole stayed in front of her townhouse, she refused to emerge from her room. It finally dissipated in a wisp of smoke. Perfect timing if she did say so herself. She had depleted her fridge to only one apple, one beet, and a pack of pickled mustard greens. She tugged on a pair of jeans and wrapped a scratchy, knitted scarf around her neck. Then she grabbed her reusable grocery bag and wallet and headed out.

If Yuan had realized a millisecond earlier, maybe she’d still be in her room, lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, wondering what she’d tell her parents once they arrived. But she’d taken five steps before realizing the sky was pitch black, the ground pitch black, and as she spun around, her entire surroundings engulfed in black, no sign of her townhome or the off-red fire hydrant or the overgrown grapefruit tree when she looked back. The tip of her elbow was beginning to go translucent, fading into her surroundings. Or lack thereof.

Yuan crossed her arms. “If it’s going to be like this, I want double my original salary and an assistant.” Then she reached for her phone to tell her parents that plans were off. She sighed, her shoulders drooping and back slouching with exhaustion. Or relief?

Author’s Biography

Lucy Zhang writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in CRAFT, The Spectacle, Redivider, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbooks HOLLOWED (Thirty West Publishing) and ABSORPTION (Harbor Review). Find her at https://lucyzhang.tech