Speculative fiction.
Mara noticed the title because she was the one who had typed it into the discard list.
On Monday afternoon, the book was called A Practical Guide to Municipal Drainage, Volume II. It had not left the library since 1987. Its checkout card was a clean grid of blue lines, apart from a brown thumbprint that might have belonged to the person who installed the pocket.
The rules were simple. A book that had not circulated in ten years could be removed to make room for one that might. Mara disliked the word removed, which had been selected because thrown away caused trouble at council meetings.
She added the drainage guide to the spreadsheet and placed a yellow dot on its spine.
Tuesday morning, the yellow dot was still there, but the cover now read What the River Took.
Mara carried it to the circulation desk.
"Did someone re-cover this?" she asked.
Devon looked at the book. "That was fast."
"What was fast?"
"Nothing." He took a sip of coffee and became very interested in the returns bin.
The catalog still described 412 pages of culverts, runoff coefficients, and trench diagrams. Inside, that was exactly what the book contained. Only the cover had changed. Across a black river, silver letters promised loss, weather, and at least one difficult mother.
By lunch, three patrons had picked it up. One read the back, frowned at the paragraph about storm drains, and put it down. Another carried it as far as the self-checkout machine before opening to a diagram of a concrete headwall.
The third checked it out.
Mara removed the yellow dot.
Three weeks later, the book returned. Its title had changed again.
You Are Standing Above a Buried Creek.
This time it had a pale green cover and a map-like pattern of branching lines. It went out twice in one day. Then it became Why Your Basement Smells Like Rain, which produced a waiting list.
The content never changed. Chapter four remained "Design Considerations for Box Culverts." Appendix C still offered a table of corrugated metal pipe sizes. Yet every new cover found someone whose curiosity could carry them across the gap between title and first page.
Mara began to suspect other books.
A biography of Millard Fillmore moved itself from the bottom shelf to eye level. A 1974 guide to home canning acquired the subtitle Food Security for Uncertain Times. Nobody could prove the books were responsible. Books are very good at remaining still while people look directly at them.
Only the drainage guide kept changing its name. Its circulation climbed from zero to forty-six. Patrons left pencil marks beside passages about flood plains. Someone underlined, "Water follows the lowest available path," and wrote same in the margin.
At the next collection meeting, Devon displayed a chart.
"Unexpected success story," he said, pointing to the drainage book's blue bar. "Maybe we should order Volume I."
Mara did not mention the covers. Instead she asked what happened when a book was borrowed for a promise it did not keep.
"It still circulated," Devon said.
"That isn't what I asked."
The following morning, the book was waiting on her desk. No one admitted putting it there.
Its cover was plain gray again. The title said A Practical Guide to Municipal Drainage, Volume II. Beneath it, in smaller type, was a new line:
You kept me. What are you going to read?
Mara opened to page one.