Alice, the Cockroach, and the Library Under the Floorboards

by Gerrard T. Wilson

Alice discovered the library entirely by accident, which is how most important libraries prefer to be discovered.

She was sitting at the kitchen table in Ballykillduff, listening to Mrs Doyle explain why the kettle had recently become philosophical, when a biscuit crumb slipped from Alice’s fingers and vanished through a narrow crack between the floorboards.

Alice leaned down to peer into the gap.

“Hello?” she said, because in Ballykillduff it was always wise to assume something might answer.

Something did.

“Please return all crumbs within fourteen days,” said a very small voice.

Alice blinked.

“Who said that?”

“I did,” replied the voice politely. “Assistant Librarian, Third Class.”

A tiny cockroach climbed through the crack in the floor and stood beside Alice’s shoe. He carried a speck of dust under one arm as if it were a book.

“You dropped this,” he said, pushing the crumb toward her.

“I think you may keep it,” Alice said.

The cockroach bowed.

“Much appreciated. Donations are the backbone of the archive.”

---

The cockroach introduced himself as Archivist Clatterthorpe.

“Would you care to see the collection?” he asked.

Alice, who had fallen down wells, through mirrors, and once into a teapot of unusual depth, saw no reason to refuse.

“Very much,” she said.

He led her to the crack in the floorboard.

“Please reduce yourself to library-appropriate proportions.”

Alice did not know how to do this, but the floorboard kindly adjusted its distance from her until she was exactly the right size.

Together, they descended.

---

Beneath the cottage floor stretched a vast hall constructed from small, forgotten things.

Matchboxes formed shelves.
Buttons became ladders.
Rulers made corridors.
Knitting needles held up the ceiling.

Dust drifted gently like snowfall.

And everywhere — absolutely everywhere — were things humans had dropped.

Crumbs arranged in labelled trays.
Lost buttons catalogued by colour.
Coins stacked in careful towers.
Pencil stubs filed by emotional importance.

On tiny scraps of paper, Alice saw single words:
“later”
“sorry”
“perhaps”
“I meant to say”

“What is this place?” Alice whispered.

“The Library of Things That Fell,” said Clatterthorpe proudly.
“We preserve what humans forget.”

---

They passed through many departments:
The Archive of Misplaced Ideas.
The Hall of Unfinished Sentences.
The Department of Lost Socks (incomplete).
The Crumb Repository (extensive).

“Cockroaches,” Clatterthorpe explained, “are natural archivists. We outlive most things, and we rarely throw anything away.”

Alice found this unexpectedly comforting.

They paused beside a large breadcrumb being polished by several cockroaches.

“That,” said Clatterthorpe reverently, “fell during the Great Sandwich Incident of 1983.”

---

Eventually they reached a quiet corner of the library.

Here the shelves were nearly empty.

Dust lay undisturbed.

Clatterthorpe’s antennae lowered slightly.

“We are losing things,” he said.

“How?” Alice asked.

“Humans forget differently now,” the cockroach replied.
“We once collected letters never sent. Now we collect messages never written.”

He gestured to a shelf holding nothing at all.

“That is today’s delivery.”

The emptiness felt heavier than any book.

---

Alice sat down on the library floor and thought for a while.

Then she picked up a pencil stub and wrote carefully on a small scrap of paper:

I nearly forgot this place,
but I did not.

She placed it gently on the empty shelf.

Clatterthorpe stared.

“That counts,” he said softly.

Other cockroaches gathered.

One placed a grain of sugar beside Alice’s note.
Another added a thread.
Another contributed a memory of toast.

Soon the shelf was no longer empty.

And the library felt warmer.

---

When Alice climbed back through the floorboards, Mrs Doyle was still speaking to the kettle, which now appeared to be listening.

Alice brushed the dust from her skirt.

“Library hours remain indefinite!” called Clatterthorpe from below.

Alice smiled.

From that day forward, she occasionally dropped things on purpose:
crumbs,
words,
small notes,
once even an entire biscuit (catalogued immediately).

Because somewhere beneath Ballykillduff, a library was remembering the world in case the world forgot itself.

---

The Gentle Twist

Years later — though not many, because time in Ballykillduff is considerate that way — Alice was again sitting at the same kitchen table.

Another crumb slipped through the same crack.

This time, Alice did not look down.

Instead, she listened.

From beneath the floor came the faint sound of careful shelving, quiet conversation, and the soft turning of very small pages.

Then a new voice said:

“New arrival — memory category.”

Another voice replied:

“Label?”

And Clatterthorpe answered:

“Alice.”

Alice smiled into her teacup.

Because she realized the library was no longer keeping only the things people dropped.

It had begun, very gently, to keep the people too.

And below the floorboards, the cockroaches made room on the shelves — just in case.