Dust on the Shelves

Forced to close her bookstore during a city strike, an elderly woman feels trapped between a modern protest and her past.

The tape was the insult. Not the notice itself, printed on cheap paper with its smudged, angry font screaming about solidarity and shutdown. Not the words. The words were meaningless, just noise from a world I no longer recognized. It was the tape. A thick, ugly strip of clear packing tape right across the glass of my door. My door. The one I’d painted myself, a dark, welcoming green, twenty-seven years ago when Stefan was still alive to hold the ladder steady.

My thumbnail scraped uselessly against the edge of it. The cold had made the adhesive brittle and stubborn. It flaked away in tiny, unsatisfying pieces, leaving a milky residue on the glass. A violation. That’s what it felt like. Someone had stood here, on my stoop, and taped this order to my life without my permission. As if the store was a public wall, a place for any stranger to post their demands. *City-Wide General Strike. All Non-Essential Businesses MUST CLOSE. Stand with Us or Stand Against Us.* Essential. I looked past my own reflection—a ghost in a gray cardigan, hair a white cloud—into the dim, quiet rows of books. My life’s work. Not essential.

The floorboards creaked under my feet as I turned away from the door. The sound was familiar, a friend. Every board in this place had its own voice. I knew the groan of the history section, the sharp pop near the poetry corner. For forty years, this small building had been my country. I’d learned its language, its geography. I’d built it, page by page. When we first bought the place, it was a derelict laundromat, smelling of mildew and forgotten soap. Stefan had torn out the machines himself, his hands raw and bleeding, while I’d knelt on the floor, scrubbing the grime from the tiles. We’d painted the walls a color like old cream and built the shelves from pine that scented the air for a year. We sanded them until they were smooth as worry stones. A safe place. A quiet place.

Now, the silence was different. It wasn’t the comfortable quiet of a sleeping shop, waiting for the morning bell. This was a dead silence, an enforced one. It hummed with the noise from outside, the faint, rhythmic chanting that seeped through the window frames and the brick. It was the sound of the city tearing itself apart, and I was locked inside with the ghosts.

I ran a hand along a row of spines, the leather and paper cool beneath my fingertips. A biography of Marie Curie. A collection of Polish folk tales. A worn copy of *The Master and Margarita*. Each one a memory. I remembered the young man who bought the folk tales, his eyes shining because they were the same ones his grandmother had told him. The girl with the purple hair who’d cried in the corner reading poetry, and I’d pretended not to see. These weren’t just objects. They were conversations, connections, anchors. This store was the life I had built in place of the one I had lost. A quiet, orderly rebellion against the chaos that had stolen my family. My protest had been to learn the language, to pay my taxes, to build something that would last, to be so unobtrusive that no one would ever have a reason to knock on my door in the middle of the night again.

The shouting outside grew louder, a wave of sound that crested and broke. It was angrier now. I moved to the front window, peering through the gap between a stack of art books and a display of local authors. The street was mostly empty, a riverbed of gray asphalt and wind-blown trash. But further down, at the intersection, a crowd was forming. A clot of dark winter coats and angry signs. They looked so young. They held their phones up like weapons or shields, their faces tight with a certainty I found terrifying.

They didn’t know what they were asking for. They chanted about revolution, about tearing things down, but they had no idea what it was like to live in the rubble. To search for familiar faces in a landscape of ruin. They thought protest was a costume you could put on, a thing of signs and slogans. They didn’t understand that real change was a slow, painful, silent thing. It was learning to stand in a bread line without screaming. It was burying your brother in a field because the cemeteries were full. It was stitching a life together from scraps, and doing it so quietly that you hoped you’d be forgotten.

A sudden bang against the front door made me jump, my heart a frantic bird in my chest. I stumbled back, knocking a small stack of paperbacks to the floor. The doorknob rattled violently. It was locked. I always kept it locked. But the sound, the sheer aggression of it, sent a splinter of ice down my spine.

"Let me in! Please!" A girl’s voice, thin and panicked. "They’re coming!"

I froze, my hand pressed to my mouth. Outside, I could hear the heavy thud of running footsteps, the bark of amplified orders. The federal patrols. They’d been sent in three days ago. They moved in armored trucks and wore black uniforms that swallowed the light. I saw the girl through the glass now. She was pressed into the alcove of my doorway, trying to make herself small. She couldn't be more than twenty. She had a red scarf wrapped around the lower half of her face and her eyes were wide with a terror that was shockingly familiar.

My mind screamed at me. *Don’t open the door. Don’t get involved. Trouble finds you when you open the door.* It was a lesson etched into my bones. But her eyes… they held the same look I remembered seeing in my mother’s, the night they came for my father. The look of an animal caught in a trap.

My hand trembled as I turned the deadbolt. The click was unnaturally loud in the silence. I opened the door just enough for her to slip through, then slammed and locked it behind her. She slid down the door, breathing in ragged, painful gasps. She smelled of cold air, sweat, and something acrid, like smoke.

"They were just grabbing people," she choked out, pulling the scarf down. Her face was pale, smudged with dirt. "Just grabbing anyone."

I didn’t offer her water. I didn’t ask if she was alright. I just stood there, my arms crossed, the fear in my stomach curdling into a hard, cold anger. "What did you expect?" The words came out sharper than I intended. "You wave your fists at the government, and you are surprised when they wave their fists back?"

The girl stared up at me, her chest still heaving. "We have a right to be here. We have a right to protest."

"A right?" I let out a short, bitter laugh. "A right is a story you tell yourself. The only thing that is real is the door you can lock, the food you can hide. You play in the street with your signs and your shouting, but when the real trouble comes, you run to hide behind a stranger’s door. A door you put your disgusting tape on."

I pointed at the notice, my finger shaking. Her eyes followed my gesture. A flicker of something—shame, maybe, or just confusion—crossed her face. "We have to show them we’re not afraid."

"You are afraid," I snapped. "I can smell it on you. You’re a terrified child who has mistaken a tantrum for a war. You know nothing of war." My voice dropped, the anger suddenly exhausted, leaving only a vast, gray weariness. "Go. When they have passed, you will go."

We waited in silence. The sound of boots on the pavement faded. The amplified voices moved further down the street. The girl got to her feet, her movements stiff. She wouldn’t look at me. "Thank you," she mumbled, her hand on the doorknob.

"Don’t thank me," I said to her back. "Just learn to be quiet."

She slipped out as quickly as she had come in, and I locked the door behind her, my whole body trembling with a rage that felt ancient and useless. I leaned my forehead against the cool glass, my breath fogging it over. Foolish girl. Foolish, loud, ignorant children. And me? A foolish old woman who still opened the door when trouble knocked.

It was only then that I saw it. On the floor where she had been sitting, a piece of paper. One of her flyers, probably fell from her pocket. I bent down to pick it up, my knees cracking in protest. My intention was to throw it away, to purge the last trace of her from my quiet space.

The paper was cheap, the printing poor. A grainy black and white photograph dominated the page. It showed one of the federal agents in full tactical gear. He wore a black helmet with a dark visor that hid his face, a bulky vest, and held a rifle across his chest. He was a faceless monolith of state power, exactly what the protestors wanted to portray.

But I wasn't seeing a federal agent. The cheap, high-contrast image dissolved the details. The modern rifle blurred into an older shape. The helmet became a different kind of helmet. The black uniform remained black. And suddenly, I was not in my bookstore in Bennhaven. I was seven years old, in the cramped living room of our apartment in a city whose name I no longer spoke. The room smelled of boiled cabbage and my mother’s fear.

The door splintered open. Not a knock, but an explosion of wood. Two soldiers. They wore black uniforms and helmets that hid their eyes. They carried rifles that seemed too big for our small room. They were looking for my father. He was a teacher. He’d signed a letter. A quiet protest. They dragged him out into the hall. My mother screamed, a sound that had no words in it. One of the soldiers turned, his face a shadow behind the helmet, and he pointed a black-gloved finger at her. At us. A silent command. *Be quiet. Or you’re next.*

My breath hitched. The flyer crumpled in my fist. The floorboards of the bookstore seemed to tilt beneath me. The smell of old paper was gone, replaced by the phantom scent of cabbage and wet wool and something metallic, like blood. The quiet of the store was no longer a comfort; it was the suffocating silence of a room where a terrible thing has just happened.

My own lecture to the girl echoed in my ears. *Learn to be quiet.* It was my father’s lesson, and my mother’s. The lesson of a lifetime of survival. Hide. Be small. Be silent. Endure. Don’t give them a reason. Don’t open the door.

And what had it gotten us? My father, a shallow grave. My mother, a life of quiet desperation. Me, a fortress of books in a foreign country, hiding from the ghosts.

The girl, with her stupid scarf and her loud, pointless shouting, she was not my enemy. The tape on my door was not the violation. The silence was the violation. The silence was the enemy. It had been all along. The quiet I had cultivated was not peace. It was surrender.

A new feeling, hot and sharp, pierced through the fog of memory. It was anger, but it was different now. It wasn't the brittle frustration of an old woman disturbed. It was the deep, cold rage of a seven-year-old girl watching her father disappear down a dark hallway.

My movements were clumsy, jerky. I stumbled to the back room, my hands searching for my coat, my keys. My heart was pounding a frantic, terrifying rhythm against my ribs. Lock the door. Yes. Lock the door. But not to hide inside. To keep the silence in, and me out.

I stood on the stoop, the cold air a shock against my flushed face. The key felt heavy and final in my hand as I turned the lock. The noise of the protest was louder out here, a siren call. It was a chaotic, ugly, frightening sound. The chants, the sirens, the distorted voice from a megaphone. It was the sound of the world breaking.

And I started walking toward it. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I had no sign. I had no slogan. I was not one of them. I was a quiet woman who had built a life on the principle of not being seen. But I walked. Past the shuttered storefronts, over the trash-strewn sidewalks. My sensible shoes made a steady, lonely sound on the pavement. I was walking directly toward the line of black-clad federal agents, who stood like statues against the screaming, surging crowd. I was walking to confront the chaos, to find the man in the black helmet who had been standing in my memory for seventy years. She walked directly into the noise, a single, brittle thing against the tide.