I have blood on my hands.

This isn’t a prompt from a Pinterest post, or one that was spurred on by this website. No, nothing could have prepared me for what I would be asked to do today at work. It went against every part of my moral and ethical code …

Today…I slaughtered books.

the task.

I got back to the library from my lunch break, and my boss says, “I have a task for you.”

She then goes on to explain how I’d be using a box cutter to cancel out the library tag in the back cover of the book, then a Sharpie to scribble out the barcode, and finally, using the box cutter again to slash through the fronts and backs of these books until I removed the cover from the book. I’d throw the cover away, and recycle the paper.

…

She admitted this wasn’t a very fun task, and she’d done it before and felt bad about it. I had a whole stack in the utility room just waiting for me to run through it with the box cutter. I had no choice, so I started, and didn’t stop until the task was done.

WHY?!

These weren’t just any ordinary books. No, these books had been previously damaged by patrons due to rain, coffee spills, damaged spines, torn pages, etc. They could no longer be circulated, so we had to do the dirty deed of laying them to rest.

It didn’t feel like a mercy killing though. No, this was cold-blooded killing. THIS…was MURDERRRRR.

I went through the books within an hour just so I could get it over with. It pained me to have to bend the spines (DEAR HEAVENS!!) of these books, and rip them apart. I ended up saving several pages from some of the books for future craft projects, but I still felt a pit in my stomach throwing the covers away, and taking a whole naked book and throwing it into the recycling bin.

Is this what Dexter felt like when he killed someone and got rid of the body? Although, he’d leave no trace…and I’d left a paper trail on the library floor.

So, really, I don’t have blood on my hands…I have ink and shredded paper and Sharpie on my hands. The massacre of one of my favorite things in the whole world lay now as a heavy burden on my shoulders. To be honest, even writing about this now, I feel numb to it. I think I had to numb my mind while I did it to actually go through with it all. It felt like an out-of-body experience: I was tearing these books apart, yet I was outside of myself, watching it all happen.

Yes, I’m being dramatic about this for blogging purposes.

…sort of.

Mishy 🦋🔪