The thing about the bookcase was it never suited his sensibility to begin with.
He liked to re-arrange his shelves every week.
No book’s position ever secure or safe.
His tastes were always changing, in addition to his allegiances.
One day the top shelf—full of hardcovers—could not hold the weight and in the middle of night the books poured down on the ground.
So many minds were all over the place.
They looked better, like that, on the floor, he thought, rather than stacked on top of each other.
They remained like that for months.
Since the shelves were balancing on tiny silver nubs, the second shelf quickly followed suit: dispensing of contemporary fiction; and in the process the weight of it knocked off the third shelf, which was full of plays and poetry.
Nothing could displace the heavy texts that populated the last shelf: anthologies that he was forced to buy while pursuing his literature degree.
Then, all of a sudden, he had three piles of books pressed against the wall.
A broken bookcase was a thing to be addressed for a later date.
For a long time, it remained like this (lots of time might pass before someone takes action to fix the problems around them), but then the time came when the chaos was unbearable, so he went out to the store and placed an order for a new one.
Before the new foundation arrived, he had to destroy the old, so he transferred each of the piles to another room and cleared the last shelf: of the dog-eared and sticky-noted tomes, the coffee tables and magazines.
He found a screw driver, loosened all the joints then started to pull it apart and watched as sprays of dust sullied the air as it all came tumbling down.
It had been a nuisance longer than an assistance, he thought triumphantly.
He took its bones and placed it by the maple tree in front of his house so it could be picked up by someone who did god-knows-what with them.
Standing in the fresh air he felt like the whole street had been watching him— remarking to themselves: so this is what he does on his time off—it was the same people who saw the delivery men the next day, handing him a large box.
From then on all his books were at peace, stably collecting new dust.