Free Library of Orphaned Hearts by Annie Reed Page A

city’s culinary artisans. She imagined that life on Olympus in the days of myth and legend could not have been quite so perfect, and her wild heart celebrated each dawn and dusk as a new adventure.
    But adventures, like days made of perfection, eventually end.
    A new hardness settled over the city. Gretta felt it in her bones, and her fingers twisted and faltered on the strings. Other street musicians felt it, and they took their fine instruments and their fragile hearts and turned away in search of a place more welcoming of their songs. The culinary artisans felt it as well, no longer sharing their creations freely, and the food lost its richness and unique flavor.
    Gretta stayed even as the city changed around her. She sang the songs her fingers could no longer play, but her voice had never been her finest instrument. Her heart grew despondent and weary, and one night when she sent it soaring out over the bay to the vast ocean beyond, it failed to ride the fog back home to her.
    Bereft, she wandered the streets looking for that part of herself she feared she would never see again. She slept in strange doorways and ate scraps of leftovers that had no taste and little aroma. Her body aged and her hair grew unkempt and gray, and even though she sang the songs she knew well, the melodies grew rough and unfocused without her heart’s influence.
    She thought herself lost forever until one night a stranger placed an old-fashioned iron key in her upturned hat next to the quarter she had placed there herself.
    “What’s this for?” she asked.
    The stranger, who looked less like a man and more like a piece of air made of shadows upon shadows, held out a book, battered and worn, the dust jacket ripped and faded.
    Gretta took the book with crooked, trembling fingers, unable to read the language of the words on the spine.
    Turning the book over, she expected to see more unreadable words describing a story she could never know. Instead, a plain back greeted her. The words “The Library” had been written in a spidery hand in the middle of all that blank plainness, and below an address on Haight.
    The book pulsed beneath her fingertips, and she felt a familiar longing for strings and hollow wood and the whitecaps on the bay.
    Could it be?
    “Is it mine?” she asked.
    “No,” the stranger said, voice neither male nor female but kind. “It’s only a loan.”
    Trembling for a different reason, Gretta felt like holding her breath, but she asked a question that became more familiar to her over the years than her own name.
    “How long?”
    The stranger smiled a smile she didn’t need to see in order to know it existed.
    “As long as you need.”

 
     
     
     
     
    3
     
    The library door squealed in protest, the old wood complaining, as a new patron entered the library.
    Thin and blonde and dwarfed by the guitar case strapped on her back, the girl’s shoulders hunched as if the weight of the world rested on her fragile bones. Her age was hard to judge. Gretta would have thought her young, but the ashy emptiness she brought in with her like winter fog made her seem ancient.
    Ancient and lost, as lost as Gretta herself had been.
    “I don’t know why I’m here,” the girl said in greeting. “I’ve never been in this part of the city, and I...”
    She shrugged, the gesture expressing a feeling Gretta knew well but hadn’t been able to put words herself when she’d first been handed a book from the library.
    Gretta hadn’t meant to take responsibility for the library, hadn’t meant to become the guardian of the well-used books and their precious cargo. She’d only meant to return the book she’d been given, but the iron key implied otherwise. When she’d unlocked the protesting wooden door and stepped into the shadowy depths between the shelves for the first time, the books had welcomed her with an unabashed enthusiasm that made her own heart swell, and she knew her new purpose in life.
    “Perhaps you’d like a