THE LIBRARY OF UNFINISHED BOOKS

By Lola Dam,

It appeared overnight, in the hollow space between the old train station and the florist who never watered her plants.

No one saw it being built. No trucks, no workers, not even the sound of a hammer. Just one morning, there it was—a squat building with rain-darkened brick, a crooked sign that read:

THE LIBRARY OF UNFINISHED BOOKS

Most people thought it was a prank. Or performance art. The town had a reputation for quiet oddities—a bakery that never opened before noon, a post office that lost more letters than it sent.

But when Mara walked through the library’s doors, it didn’t feel like a joke.

It smelt like paper and ink and something faintly metallic, like a typewriter left out in the rain. The shelves stretched impossibly far for a building that looked so small. Each spine bore no title, only initials.

She wandered.

Turned down an aisle marked Abandoned After First Chapter and another labelled Forgotten During Grief. There were books with pages halfway written, sentences stopped mid-thought, and entire characters waiting quietly in the margins.

Then she found it.

Tucked on a low shelf near the back. The same green cover she remembered. Her initials, small and uneven: M.L.

It was hers.

The novel she started seven years ago. Written during coffee breaks and after dreams. She remembered the protagonist’s name, the shape of the opening scene, and the last paragraph she wrote before closing the document and never returning.

Her heart stammered.

But when she opened it—

It was finished.

Not in her words, exactly. Not in the voice she would have used. But the characters were there. The story. Even the ending she never dared to write.

She sat on the floor and read until the air in the library felt like breath.

The story was gentle and aching, not perfect but full of the kind of truth that doesn’t try too hard to impress. She cried when she reached the last page.

Then she flipped back to the front and found a note, scribbled in the margins:

“I only helped. You already knew how it ended.”

Mara didn’t take the book home.

There were no check-out counters. No librarians in sight. Just a quiet understanding that some things stayed. That maybe not everything unfinished was meant to be taken away.

She returned the next day. And the next.

There were always more books. Other people’s abandoned poems. Incomplete memoirs. Sketches of stories left behind in notebooks or dreams. Some she read. Some she simply touched, as if that might be enough.

One afternoon, she brought her own notebook. Not to finish the same story, but to begin another.

She wrote in long, careful lines, letting the silence of the place carry her forward.

The book she left behind was shelved three days later. She found it near Stories Started in Winter. Someone had already added a paragraph she hadn’t written.

It wasn’t invasive. It was tender. Like someone had picked up a thread she'd dropped and gently braided it into the rest.

Weeks passed. The town began to whisper about the library. People ventured in. Some came out with tears. Some with purpose. A few said nothing at all.

No one ever found out who built it. Or who tended the shelves.

But those who visited often began to write again. To finish things. Or start things they didn’t feel afraid to leave unfinished.

Not everything needs an ending, Mara thought. Some stories just need witnesses.

She returned to the library often. Not always to write. Sometimes just to sit. To listen to the quiet hum of the pages and feel, in the stillness, that she was not alone.

Not in her doubt. Not in her hope.

Not even in the quiet act of beginning again.