The Midnight Edition Archive

A midnight obituary-radio fiction podcast.

Filed after midnight · Literary audio fiction

Illustration for Orla Minnow — fictional notice from This Day in Deaths, filed from Missoula, Montana

A listener in Missoula sent us the next name just after one this morning.

Earlier today, at the Gallatin Community College Library, Orla Minnow, 19, died after a seizure while shelving returned books in the north stacks.

Orla was a student worker, a first-year archivist in her own imagination, and, according to her girlfriend Samara, "the only person who could make dust sound like a calling." She wore cardigans with pockets large enough for index cards. She carried pencils behind both ears and forgot they were there. She kept a list in her phone titled THINGS FOUND IN BOOKS.

Orla liked abandoned bookmarks, municipal seals, old handwriting, and the names of towns that sounded invented but were not: Opportunity, Montana; Accident, Maryland; Waterproof, Louisiana; Embarrass, Minnesota.

She was shelving in juvenile fiction when she collapsed.

The last book she checked in before she died was The Map of Elsewhere.

The copy belonged to the college's children's literature collection and had been missing for nine years. It was returned through the overnight slot with no note.

On the due-date card, the last stamped name before the book disappeared was not a student's name. It was not a faculty name. Still, the name was there.

Ferris B. Noon.

  • The Map of Elsewhere
  • due-date card