I smell Chock Full o’ Nuts coffee on the day of the book burning but Mrs. Basil E. Frrankweiler herself has already been burnt up with Harry Potter and The Ruby Bridges Story and The Bridges of Madison County. Mixed together with ash. Mixed together with rage. The angry People have crammed twelve disciple Bibles into the space where To Kill a Mockingbird once staggered, drunk with a knife in its card catalog pocket. The Children are repulsed a bit by these Biblical interlopers but are hungry to read and flip through them idly as their Mothers’ cars idle out front, the books that smell like leather belts, the ones their Bible-reading fathers keep on the side table instead of books - before they whisper, come here, staggering drunk. The Women in white pants and white faces have pitchforks and pickle forks that are the perfect way to harvest pages, make silenced straw out of Moby Dick and Margaret and her god and Tom Sawyer and his fence. Because of course a blooming Blume god has to be with a small g. No dirty book would have a real god with a big G in it. The new donated Bibles have a big G god because they are special, like the clique of girls that run the school and their mothers who burn the books. The silence is still, still in the left-behind books and the covers of the ones that hid in the corners and in my library tote bag like contraband. The unraptured-by-the-fire books are ironic in their presence. Rain on your book burning day, ironic. Cavemen are still doing it doggy style and powdered sugar slash arsenic donuts are still the snacks of the day and dirty activities of the month. No one fears those books or those plot lines because a young Child in a striped shirt that matches her striped shorts the way that Garanamals easily do - has told her Mother that those books are about dinosaurs and florists who work and live in attics with their florist brothers. A Girl saves those books and the ones with medals on the front that still shine in the half-dark, stack-dark place.