Backlog
publishing volume
The first book arrived on a Tuesday. Sarah wouldn’t remember that later, but she would remember the cover: a wash of cerulean so deep it seemed to pull at the light around it, no title, only a name she’d never encountered. Maren Lys. She found it on the new releases table at the bookstore downtown, picked it up because it felt cool against her fingers, smooth as something retrieved from a riverbed.
She read it in a single evening. The story followed a cartographer mapping an ocean that kept expanding past the edges of her charts, and the prose moved the way water moves through a crack in stone, finding every gap in Sarah’s attention and filling it. By the time she surfaced it was past midnight, the book splayed on her chest, her eyes aching from the kind of sustained focus she hadn’t felt since childhood, when stories had been indistinguishable from the air she breathed.
She bought the second novel the following week, then the third. By month’s end Maren Lys had published seven, and Sarah owned them all. They filled a shelf in her living room, their spines a gradient of blues and greens arranged like a cross-section of the sea.
“Seven novels since March,” she told Dani over coffee. “And they connect. Characters from the first book show up three books later, older, changed. It’s this whole living architecture.”
Dani set down her mug. “Since March?”
“I know how it sounds.”
“That’s not writing, Sarah. That’s a printing press with a plot.”
Sarah turned her coffee in her hands. The surface caught the window light and held it, trembling. “You’d have to read them,” she said.
By summer, the shelf had become two bookcases. Sarah pushed her couch against the far wall, stacked volumes on the coffee table, in columns along the hallway that rose to her hip like the remnants of old walls. She read during her commute, on her lunch break, before bed. She set a goal: forty pages a day, then sixty, then a hundred. It should have been enough. The publication rate climbed from two books a week to one a day, and the narratives kept branching, new characters surfacing in coastal villages and flooded plazas that connected to storylines she hadn’t reached, references she could feel pressing against the text like shapes beneath a tarp.
She began to notice moisture where there shouldn’t be any. A thin film on the hardwood near the front door, cool when she stepped through it barefoot. Condensation gathering on the windows in patterns that didn’t match the weather. She wiped it away and kept reading.
The flood came in August. She woke to find her bedroom floor shining under an inch of standing water, books floating in it, their pages fanned open like pale, exhausted wings. She knelt and gathered them, pressing them against towels, and the spines read like coordinates to a place she’d lost her bearing in: Volume 34. Volume 51. Volume 87. She was on Volume 17.
She called Dani that evening. The books had become geography, rising in ridgelines along every wall, filling the spaces between furniture like sediment. Between them the water sat at her ankles, warm, carrying a faint mineral taste when it splashed against her calves.
“Just skip to the end,” Dani said.
“There’s a character, Elise. She’s been searching for something since Volume 3, and I think it connects back to the cartographer in the first book. But the answer is ahead of me, in a volume I can’t reach yet.”
“Then let it go.”
“You’re asking me to walk out of a conversation mid-sentence.”
Dani was quiet for a moment. “How many books are there now, Sarah?”
Sarah looked at the walls that were no longer visible, at the water around her ankles and the columns of spines rising out of it, dark as kelp.
“More than I can count,” she said.
By October, she was wading. The water rose to her knees, then settled at her waist, and its surface moved in slow, patient swells that rocked the floating books against one another with a sound like shuffling cards. She caught volumes as they drifted past, read what she could, chapters and fragments and single paragraphs that opened onto scenes she had no context for, characters mid-grief, mid-joy, speaking to people she hadn’t met yet. It was like pressing her ear to the wall of a stranger’s house and hearing laughter she couldn’t place.
She kept reading. Volume 19 became 20, then 21. Characters she loved were growing old in volumes she would never open, carrying scars from conflicts she would never witness, and the thought sat in her chest like a stone worn smooth by repetition.
One evening, standing in her kitchen with the water at her collarbone and a book held above her head, she stopped. A wave lapped at her chin. On the page in front of her, Elise stood at the edge of a mapped ocean, her charts spread across a table that was already sinking, and said: I think the point was never to reach the other side.
Sarah closed the book. She pressed it flat against her chest and felt the water rise over her mouth, her nose, her eyes. It closed above her, green and silent and full of pages turning in slow suspension, each one luminous as a jellyfish pulsing through deep water.
She breathed in.
It filled her lungs, and it was not drowning. It tasted like ink and salt and the particular stillness of a library after closing. Around her the books drifted in gentle currents, pages illuminated from within, and she understood with the calm clarity of a diver who stops fighting the depth: she was not behind. She was inside it. The story did not require her completion. It only asked that she be present, the way an ocean asks nothing of the body it carries.
She turned a page. Somewhere far above, another book was being written.
She let it come.