Puzzles for a Pocket Village
by Charles C. Cole
I must mention first and foremost that my home is not like yours; here, unexplainable things happen. Most people think nothing of it, leastways say little. Let’s say our reality is warped compared to yours. I guess you could call Thistleberg a pocket universe. Some wise people think of its origin as the unending dream of a long-dead metaphysicist that — perhaps by force of will or critical mass — took on a life of its own.
What’s most important is that we villagers have all the emotions and dreams of a bigger world. In fact, if you’ll excuse the differences, we’re quite the same. How do we know about you? Outside the loading dock of our public library, mysterious boxes appear every month with used books. One theory is these are all books once perused by our voraciously reading creator... and they’re slowly being remembered.
We have no countries, no oceans, no fancy means of travel. Where would we go? There is only our little town, around which is a spongy wall of impassable grey mist, like clouds that got heavy from overthinking, sank down from the sky and stacked up on one another, hardening layer by layer over time. But, like most clouds, they are not perfectly flat in their layers, and there are slit-like openings where someone slips us notes along the ground under the lowest ones. Sometimes we even push notes back.
I live alone in a tiny house you could fit on a large oxcart, with one big room, that multitasks as kitchen, bedroom and living room. I have sliding windows along the exterior wall that look out at the barrier. On my more whimsical days, I’ve been known to use my fingers to “carve” the figure of a comical animal in the foamy substrate, but the cloud droops and shifts over time and erases my creative expression.
My good friend Georgia stands outside my open sliding glass door, without knocking, as if waiting to be discovered. She rubs her hands together mischievously.
I’m nervous. “Georgia, go away,” I say. “Haven’t I told you a hundred times that you’re too pretty to be my friend? We live in a filthy fishbowl. Please don’t give me a reason to smile.”
“I have answers,” she says. “You’ll want to hear this.”
“Fine,” I say, instantly caving. “Enter.”
“Can’t,” she responds. “No room. You come outside.”
I do as she commands, as always. She makes my life interesting and even fun on occasion. We’re both about twenty. She’s taller than me with more muscles and more energy: an Amazon. If all women in town were like her, they could probably collectively gouge a tunnel through the wall.
Georgia climbs onto my picnic table and stretches out like a human sacrifice, but with a huge drunken smile. She looks at me with her chin up, her head upside-down. “Ask me.”
“What are we talking about?” I ask.
“We got a message from the other side. A note was slipped under the wall near Mrs. Gammon’s house.”
Mrs. Gammon is the librarian.
“She was afraid to open it for some reason. She said I could have it.”
“And?”
“The books are all real,” Georgia says.
I’ve seen them. I’ve read most of them. This is not news.
“They were thrown away and ended up here.”
“Thrown away?”
“Banned.”
“Really? The Adventures of Huck Finn was banned? I guess I can sort of see why.”
“Yep. And Carrie, The Stand and It and The Shining and To Kill a Mockingbird and—”
I interrupt: “I love that book. You love that book. Are you sure?”
“There’s more. Slaughterhouse-Five, Brave New World, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Grapes of Wrath, and Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. All of them. It’s all explained in the note.”
I hold out my open hand, palm up, and wiggle my fingers, a universally understood gesture.
“What?” she asks.
“Let me see the note.”
“I stuffed it in my bra, so nobody would be tempted to take it from me. Are you tempted?”
“Not one bit,” I say, lowering my hand, though I am a little tempted.
“I don’t have it anymore.”
“Why not?”
“I wrote a bunch of questions on the blank side of the note and pushed it back under the wall.”
“You did what?”
“To get more answers, silly. To start a dialogue while we have their attention. To learn more about everything, not just books.”
“And?”
“I’m still waiting.”
“Mrs. Gammon will never get another book,” I lament. “I mean, there can’t be that many more banned books, right? We’ve probably already got every one.”
“Joey, you precious boy,” says Georgia, teasing, “don’t kid yourself. Not every town is as open-minded as Thistleberg. Think about it: these collections of words on paper apparently threatened the very brittle fabric of civilized society where they come from.”
I sit heavily at the picnic table.
Georgia sees the shock on my face. She gets up and sits beside me, putting an arm around my shoulders. “You okay?” she asks. “It’s not as bad as you think. So, some books are banned. They’re still written and still read and appreciated, at least by us, and maybe a few other rebels out there in other pocket universes. It’s not like a contagious corruption of the mind and we’re all goners.”
“That’s not it,” I say. “You’ve explained the books. Maybe the same logic determines who lives in this town. Maybe we’re all nonconformists on the fringe of society. Maybe we didn’t randomly grow up here but were actually exiled here and don’t remember.”
Georgia screws up her beautiful face in deep and convoluted thought. “Or... I made it all up to push your buttons. What did we read once, from an 18th-century poem? ‘Where ignorance is bliss, ’Tis folly to be wise.’ Let folly be today’s stretch goal. Forget I said anything. I’m hungry. Let’s go to my place.”
She tugs my hand, and I try hard to forget.
Copyright © 2026 by Charles C. Cole
