Micro Monday: Library Fines

Welcome to Micro Monday

Welcome to Micro Monday, where shorter stories pack a bigger punch. Every week, you’ll be served up a bite-sized tale designed to unsettle you in under 400 words. But Micro Monday isn’t just about telling stories in fewer words. The aim is to deliver surgical strikes of horror that make you spill your morning coffee or haunt your lunch break. Micro Monday is about delivering maximum dread in minimum time. Because sometimes the most terrifying moments happen in the space between one breath and the next.

Library Fines

The third overdue notice arrives on a Tuesday. Rebecca stuffs it into her handbag alongside the others, promising herself she’ll return the books tomorrow. She always promises tomorrow.

It starts with The Secret Garden. While reading, she suddenly recalls feeding chickens behind a Yorkshire farmhouse, the smell of wet earth and manure. But Rebecca grew up in London flats. She’s never owned chickens.

By Thursday, the memories multiply. Pride and Prejudice brings dancing lessons in a cramped Edinburgh bedsit. The Handmaid’s Tale carries the weight of holding a stillborn child, grief so sharp it doubles her over.

Each book bleeds someone else’s life onto the pages.

She tries returning them, but her legs won’t carry her to the library. The borrowed memories feel more vivid than her own childhood now. More real than her job, her flat, her carefully constructed life.

A contemporary woman with dark hair sits at a wooden table in a dimly lit library, reading an open book with stacks of books beside her. She's surrounded by translucent, ghostly figures from different historical periods - including Victorian-era women in period dress and other spectral forms rendered in ethereal blue light. The library setting features towering bookshelves stretching into shadows, warm lamplight contrasting with the cold supernatural glow emanating from the phantom figures. The atmosphere is gothic and unsettling, suggesting memories and experiences bleeding through from the books into reality.

Wuthering Heights whispers of moors she’s never walked, love she’s never felt. Jane Eyre burns with rage that isn’t hers but fills her completely.

The final notice arrives with a phone call. “Rebecca? This is unusual—you’ve had those books for six months.”

Six months? She borrowed them last week.

“We need them back. Other people are waiting.”

She looks at the stack beside her bed. Inside each cover, memories swirl like sediment in old wine. A first kiss behind school buildings. The taste of birthday cake at age seven. Learning to drive in her father’s Morris Minor.

None of these memories belongs to her.

She no longer remembers what does.

“Rebecca? Are you there?”

The librarian’s voice sounds familiar now. Like her own voice, but older. Tired.

“Rebecca?” says Rebecca slowly. “Yes, I think I used to know someone by that name.”

On the Fringes of Reality