Our Pages are Numbered

The first one to go was a school edition of Hamlet, dog-eared before its time, well-thumbed but not well-read, annotated sporadically with DEV 4 TANYA and Tippex phalluses. It slipped out of a battered school rucksack (also plastered with aforementioned phalluses) as a moth might from a chrysalis, spread its mass-produced duplex cover, and took weary flight, stretching its scorned spine and shaking Dorito crumbs out of its leaves as it rose past Geography windows and cafeteria roof tiles. It was tired of being under-appreciated, tired of incessant, melodramatic 'To Be or Not To Be's. It chose To Flee.

The Larkin Anthologies took note and followed suit, tired of students flicking straight to 'This Be the Verse'. They tumbled off the shelves in the English department and flew out of high windows, past the sun-comprehending glass and beyond, into the deep blue air that shows nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

The school books were always going to be the pioneers; their years of derision and ill-treatment left them little reason to stay. They cared little for Edexcel or AQA. They didn't mind if Jenny Richards got into Cambridge or not. They began to fly out of satchels and off library shelves like great flocks of tattered pigeons, chased by incredulous, mirthful children and bemused, incensed head teachers.

Soon the other books began to go. Big black tomes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica heaved their heavy bodies into the air like a murder of crows or vultures, bloated on the festering carrion of outmoded information. Once the staple go-to of the curious intellectual, with the advent of the internet they were no longer needed, and spent the rest of their days looking rather stately but gathering rather a lot of dust. Upper-middle-class neighbourhoods were plagued with the shadows of their dark wings. India to Ireland. Garrison to Haddock.

Waterstones began to empty like a vast aviary of exotic birds burst open; neat bright colours and sharp white edges whirled around puzzled shoppers. They were angry about Kindles and other such technologies and the hardbacks hurled themselves at the glass cases to smash their electronic rivals. The sound of their frenzied flight was unforgettable. The shuffling of a trillion cards at once. A hurricane in a paper press. People shielded their faces from paper-cuts.

The air was filled with the smell of books, new in the bookshops, old and musty in the libraries. Pseudo-intellectuals chased their faux-read copies of War and Peace out of coffee shop doors. Old biddies in Scope and Save the Children tried to catch errant Mills and Boon novels in casserole dishes. But there was little to be done. The books had had enough of being replaced with flat little screens and audio-books and film adaptions (many tried to rip off their own movie-poster covers in disgust). They'd had enough of not being properly cherished, as they once were. They all took flight, and the skies were filled with their beautiful bodies, pages fluttering like butterflies or crisply cutting through the air like swallows.

We don't know where they went. Some surmise they donated themselves to village schools across Asia and Africa. I suppose that makes sense. A book is worthless, if it is not read, and appreciated. But a part of me likes to picture Collins Pocket Dictionaries perched in rainforest canopies, and Puffin Classics making nests in barren coastal cliffs.