[FICTION][03/25/26]Stacks
by Jacek Blaszkiewicz
There is a man disassembling himself in my library. First he hangs two bulging plastic bags that read THANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOU on the backrest of a chair, then he body slams a charcoal camping backpack onto the floor with a THUD. His winter coat is almost a parka but not quite. ROC-A-WEAR is embroidered across the back and I swear I haven’t seen that Jay-Z brand since the Y2K scare. The man drapes the coat onto another chair. He removes his black baseball cap with white DET letters on it and balances it on the coat. On his tattooed, bald head is a blue bandana. He removes that as well, folding it and placing it into one of the two THANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOU bags. There are layers to this man, I can already tell.
His black sweatshirt says DETROIT -VS- EVERYBODY, which is funny because I am wearing that same sweatshirt and so are half of the people in the library. It’s warm in here so I’m not surprised that he removes it, lifts the DET cap from the coat, drapes the sweatshirt on top of the coat, then replaces the cap. The man is now in a white t-shirt that simply says T-SHIRT on the front, probably as an ironic joke, and this is where things get testy. He removes his T-SHIRT t-shirt, puts the DET cap back onto his bald head, and drapes the T-SHIRT t-shirt over his DETROIT -VS- EVERYBODY sweatshirt. Topless, the man looks up and catches my gaze.
I nod. You would too.
His boots are pristine. I get excited every time I see that cut of boot. I quietly yell, “TIMBERLAND!” to myself whenever I see them. He removes his left boot and it appears that he also removes his whole foot in the process, for in its place is nothing. Not a stump or prosthetic, just nothing. Like a blurred image of a phallus. He has good balance, this man, because he now removes his other boot and it’s the same scenario, except now he has two blurred phalluses for feet upon which he appears to levitate over the library carpet. No blood, no dust, just nothing. The TIMBERLAND!s are arranged neatly under the table. This, I observe as the senior librarian, is a kind gesture. The boots do not threaten to trip anyone walking to, or from, the stacks. The levitating, shirtless, phallus-footed man scratches his beard—a thick, lumberjack-brown coat of facial fur, and his long fingernails expel beard oil particles into the air where they hit my nose like a haymaker. Seeing my nasal discombobulation, the man again meets my gaze, as if to communicate an apology, and promptly pinches off his fingers, one by one, until only the two pinching fingers are left. The remaining eight are deposited into the other THANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOU bag. With his final two digits he reaches for his thick beard and pulls it until the entire thing goes RRRIP like Velcro off his face. Still gripping his beard pelt, he glances at the wall to his right. Above the library bulletin board is a rainbow-colored banner that reads BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE IN THE WORLD. His eyes move from the banner back to me. He holds my gaze, longer this time, as if to communicate, “GANDHI DIDN’T SAY THAT.” And I nod again, as if to affirm, “I KNOW.”
The man stuffs the beard pelt into the small pocket of his backpack. He has a round, gentle face, his lips slightly parted to accommodate two large front teeth. The man then uses those teeth to pull on the two remaining fingers of his right hand until POP POP they, too, pop out. Emboldened, he spits the fingers into the flat of his fingerless left hand and, balancing the cylindrical extremities, rolls them into the first THANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOU bag—the one, if I recall, with the blue bandana.
At this point the man becomes visibly disconcerted. His agitated demeanor is making the library patrons uncomfortable. Having witnessed the man disrobe, de-foot, and de-digit himself, I fear I know what’s next—arms and legs. He walks toward me, placing one phantom foot in front of the other. Muscle memory, probably. I pretend to be absorbed in reshelving the books in my cart.
“Excuse me, sir?” he asks, unthreateningly.
“How may I help you?” I ask, threatened.
I hear a distant SHH! from one of our older patrons.
“I’m just looking for some work. Any chance there’s some work around here?”
“No, sorry,” I lie, knowing full well that we are, in fact, hiring, but that our part-time staff is comprised entirely of local high school students.
“I see, okay,” he says, using his left palm to scratch his bare chest. He has a MOM tattoo.
“Do you think I could get some money for the bus?”
“I’m sorry,” I hedge, without fully comprehending my fear of this man who literally cannot lay a finger on me.
An hour later I take my lunch. I’m not hungry. In the library break room, I sip a hot cup of coffee and review my encounter with the man in the ROC-A-WEAR faux-parka and the DET cap and the DETROIT -VS- EVERYBODY sweatshirt and the T-SHIRT t-shirt.
“If he’s so poor, then where did he even get those TIMBERLANDS!?” asks a student worker wearing a GVSU hoodie.
My shoulder hurts. I reach my left arm over my right. With a firm grip on my bicep, I pull hard until I hear a satisfying, relieving POP.
“That’s what I was thinking,” I say.
JACEK BLASZKIEWICZ’s writing appears in Argyle, Exacting Clam, Gargoyle, Twin Flame Literary, and various academic venues. He is the author of a book on music in nineteenth-century Paris and teaches at Wayne State University. You can follow him on Instagram @jack.blaszkiewicz and on Bluesky @jacekbl.bsky.social.