The Librarian's Guest, by Thalia James
Art Thatcher was quite looking forward to their retirement. They used the word lightly, of course, there wasn't really any retiring from borrowing, but she thought she had gotten about as close as a person could get. She had eventually taken the plunge, leaving their previous dwelling and setting course for that palace of knowledge, the local library. With a community garden situated right nearby, and a treasure trove of barely perused books tucked away at the back of the building, by the corner of speculative fiction and biographies, she had everything she needed to find a quiet life in the pages.
Art had first noticed Tildy because she sang. Not because she was particularly loud, and certainly not because she was any good at it, but because she was singing in a library, and because if there was one thing Art had learned about humans, it was that they liked quiet in their libraries. Granted, most of this singing happened after the library was closed, when the guests had left, and the human assumed she was alone with her books. She really couldn't have known that Art had just moved in, camping out in her dusty little corner, nestled into the rather obscenely large translation of A True Story that had become her first reading project. Besides, it wasn't like her singing was bad, or anything. Art was more than capable of putting up with it.
At least, that's what she thought when she first moved into the library.
Art had barely been there a week before she was looking forward to when Tildy came by to re-shelf the biographies, singing her tune. A month later, and she had heard enough to start half-mindedly humming along. It may have interrupted her reading, but Tildy was still diurnal, and Art had all night to catch up on their stories. If anything, Art saw her daily song as a wake up call, an alert that business was done for the day, and that the library would be free to peruse until dawn.
And so, every evening, when Tildy sang and restocked the shelves, Art packed up her lunch, made a nest between the pages, and sang along.
~~~
Now Mathilda Cobbler had first met a borrower some forty years prior. He was quite nice, a self-professed scholar who had come to the library in search of knowledge on astronomy. Tildy had only noticed him because of his bungled attempt at reaching said knowledge, which was located on a shelf nearly four feet off the ground. Of course, being a scholar, his climbing skills were approximately on par with those of a rat stuck in a bathtub, leaving him to be found by Tildy, hanging between two shelves by some twine caught around his sickly twisted knee.
It had been slow going at first, as Peter spent his first few nights deathly afraid of her, and Tildy had no doubts that if he had been well enough to walk, she never would have seen him again. Thankfully, by the time he had recovered from his injuries, his fears had diminished, and he ended up staying with Tildy for nearly five years, reading every book on astronomy, physics, kinematics, and the movement of celestial bodies there was to find. When he eventually set off on the long journey home, Tildy was sad to see him go, but she was young, and busy, so she moved on quickly. In the intervening decade and a half, she had nearly forgotten about the whole affair, but she still kept Henry’s room, the place the two of them had made together, in the remnants of an old shoe box, and her odd little roommate never entirely left her mind.
So it was that, when Tildy noticed that her evening karaoke sessions had picked up an accompanying vocalist, she was not overly surprised.
Not that she went rushing over to introduce herself, no, she remembered how terrified Peter had been of her at first, Tildy knew that if she wanted any chance of befriending her new guest, she would have to be subtle. And so she began baking.