A small earthquake had opened a sizable crack on the old dam upstream from the town. Evacuated citizens now watched in dismay on TV as the structure collapsed. Only the library building appeared to withstand the roaring mass of water and rubble that leveled their deserted town. Suddenly, drone TV cameras zoomed in on a balcony near the top of the library, where a visibly agitated man peered down into the waters.
When a rescue team deemed it safe to enter the ravaged building and look for the mysterious man, they found Edgar Walker, a computer technician who used to work there. In a state of confusion, all he managed to exclaim repeatedly was: “All the lost words! I’m so sorry.”
As it turned out, a few days earlier Edgar had been asked to recover data from an old laptop that belonged to Wilma Speare, one of the greatest contemporary writers in the country and recently deceased. Speare cared little for file backups and had left an inordinate amount of unpublished material buried in the guts of her worn-out but faithful portable computer.
Edgar, sadly, had recently divorced and taken to the bottle. In a hungover daze, he had formatted and completely overwritten the wrong hard disk, wiping to oblivion potentially dozens of unprinted masterpieces. In horror, he avoided everyone for days and the unexpected deluge seemed the perfect chance to take his blunder to the grave. He just didn’t expect the library’s building to be so sturdy.
(Contribuição para um desafio do Riga Language and Literature Group do Internations em Abril de 2021.)