By the early days of the twenty-first century, advocates of book bans had managed, however accidentally, to elevate their hobby to the level of near-religion, and with it created a class of concepts that could only be called into existence if a person read them in a book. By controlling what children could read outside the home, they could thus grant parents full dominion over what ideas their children would experience in the wild. Supposedly, this was going to bring about an entire generation of heterosexual, cisgendered, compliant citizens who would be happy to fulfill their cultural duty of growing up, remaining virginal until their marriage beds, and then proceeding directly to the business of having fulfilling procreative sex, burying the world in beautiful, bouncing babies.

No amount of scholarship on the actual complexities of human nature could penetrate the minds of the people who had made “peek-a-boo” the center of their new theology, who truly believed that something that couldn’t be seen would never be believed in. To them, all deviation from a platonic ideal was brought on by exposure to those who had already been contaminated.

School libraries were the first to fall, undermined from within by school board candidates who thought that their absolute moral purity gave them the divine right to control the minds of not only their own children, but all children, everywhere. Adults who believed that children were in any sense real people with rights and lives and ideas of their own were less inclined to volunteer themselves to tell those children or their parents how they should be raised, and as a consequence, they rarely, if ever, joined the scramble for power. When they did, those same purity-based candidates would use their lives against them, painting them as untrustworthy and not safe to be around children. Bit by bit the people who didn’t want to control the minds of the next generation were pushed to the edges of the conversation, and then out of the conversation entirely, while the ones who believed their own ideas of right and wrong—and more essentially, normal and not—were allowed to shape the world to their liking.

The first waves of banned books were fought by the people those books had spoken to when they were children, or who wished those books had already existed; the ones who didn’t already see themselves reflected in every major media franchise and on every shining silver screen. They were overwhelmed by a seemingly infinite wave of “think about the children” and “do you really think it’s appropriate to start these conversations without the parents in the room?” As they lost, they consoled themselves with the thought that public libraries and bookstores still existed: All the school book bans in the world couldn’t take them away.

The laws passed. The world exhaled. The winners gloated; the losers licked their wounds and tried to convince themselves that the worst-case scenarios they had described were just possibilities, and not yet guaranteed.

Then, one by one, the next wave of challenges began.

These challenges were more extreme, crossing into territory that would have been unthinkable only a few unwanted regulations ago. They targeted not only excessive focus on “problematic” concepts, but the mere acknowledgment that those concepts existed. Any sexuality beyond hetero, any gender identity beyond the direct binary, was considered too much for the developing minds of children—even mentions of intersexuality were banned, lest they inspire questions that could never be answered. Books fell like leaves before the blades of the proposed bans, and their defenders were busy fighting the sudden, renewed assaults on public libraries and publishing houses: When they were needed most, they were unable to stand up for the schools.

As the second wave broke itself against the shore of independent thought, washing so much irreplaceable intellectual ground away, many of those same books vanished from any publicly accessible collection. Without a market for works that included those forbidden ideas, publishers withdrew from those spaces, until even the self-publishing services began setting limits, stacking them high as if to ward off the chances of a lawsuit.

One angry group of readers decided to fight fire with fire and assembled their own book ban proposal, taking aim at heterosexual relationships in fiction, claiming that anyone under the age of twenty-five lacked the maturity to see mentions of kissing, hand-holding, or love. They expected to be shouted down, to show how ridiculous and hypocritical the other side was being by holding a broken mirror up to their faces.

What they couldn’t have expected was an electorate exhausted by the endless jockeying for control of the minds of a nation to simply pass it all. In one legislative session, it became illegal to expose children to any mention of relationships within a school context. No more books, no more Disney movies during assemblies, no more teachers wearing wedding rings or craft periods spent making Valentine’s Day cards. It was all the purview of their parents, and the public world would have nothing to do with it.

This was success beyond even the wildest dreams of the book burners, the people who had truly believed they were striking mighty blows for the safety and sanity of a nation. Like the dog that catches the car, they didn’t know what to do…apart from keep on going. Their attacks on public libraries and publishers continued, more focused now that they had nothing else to rail against, and bit by bit, the world got smaller, even as their assaults expanded, targeting fan fiction, online markets, anything that could be gatekept with an arbitrary age limit. The world could be controlled, could be swaddled in soft harmlessness. All they needed were a few more laws, a few more lines.

(Despite the world’s sudden involuntary shrinkage, queer kids, and trans kids, and neurodivergent kids, all continued to not only exist, but to emerge, like strange butterflies hatching from the societal mold they had been expected to grow into. Taking away their guidebooks to their own lives didn’t stop them from being born, only made it more difficult for them to navigate the cruel wilds of childhood. Editing the literature has never been enough to edit the world. All we can do by showing people their own shadows in story is make things easier for them, not change the essence of who they are.)

It was almost a decade into this endless, unwinnable campaign when an underpaid legal intern who had seen her academic world narrowing year upon year, leaving her less prepared for the world than any generation before her own, looked up during a meeting and said, in the same bored tone she reserved for everything else, “The real problem is the poetry.”

The room around her stopped so abruptly that it was like a cinematic cut in a movie, one of those moments where everything froze and the soundtrack scratched like a needle on a vinyl record. She went back to scrolling her phone, unaware of the magnitude of what she had just done, while the people who employed her seized on the lifeline she had just unwittingly offered them.

Poetry. That was the problem. Not prose—oh, prose had been problematic in the start, when it had been completely unregulated and filled with dangerous notions. But poetry! Poetry was where the true dangers could be found. So much of poetry was built around love, around self-expression, even around grief—which was a terrible, sophisticated emotion that caused everyone who experienced it to mature in one fashion or another, leaving the safe waters of childhood behind as they moved into a new understanding of the world and of themselves. Without poetry, it would be easier to guide developing minds away from complicated thoughts and patterns, easier to bring them safely into a future that could be controlled for the greater social good. Banning poetry was clearly the answer to everything.

Rhyming couldn’t be banned, of course; that would have required too much editing of the language, and even the most optimistic of their company understood that a total rewriting of the dictionary would take more resources than they had at their disposal. So cats and hats would still share a phoneme, as would bugs and rugs and all other manner of simple sounds. But the poetic forms, now those could be painted as suspect, as dangerous enticements for a forming mind.

Anything more sophisticated than a nursery rhyme was suddenly considered “mature.” Radio stations were no longer the cultural force that they had once been: They lacked the political power to push back against this mass deletion of human history. Streaming services were quickly silenced for obscenity, chasing down blue laws that had gone unenforced for so long they had been forgotten, until the internet went quiet. Churches raised slightly more of an objection, at least until the people who had been crusading on their behalf reached the right ears and reminded them that no one had ever topped the missionary schools for simple rhyming songs to enthrall and command the youth: Their little lights would still be allowed to shine, and down to the river they would go every Sunday afternoon to pray, but the more complicated rhyming lines of secular music and of other faiths would be quietly deleted from the common consciousness. Without poetry, so many concepts could be erased.

Many of the most famous poets had already been effectively banned by subject matter alone. As the bans spread to consume the rest of their work, removing them entirely from the canon of what could still be taught in schools, very few people saw the danger. Until it became apparent that this time, the forbidden texts wouldn’t stop with specifics: This time, they were intending to take out entire forms.

Books teaching poetry were removed from libraries both scholastic and public, despite being strictly educational, as “gateway materials” to the more dangerous and salacious verse that lurked, just out of sight, waiting to ensnare and corrupt the youth. Those who protested were labeled dissident, dangerous, all the same terms as had been thrown at the people who once tried to defend books on the basis of diversity, inclusion, allowing children to see themselves reflected in the mirror of the fictional. Words like “sonnet,” “sestina,” “trochaic,” “scansion” lost their meanings, stripped away by the extinction of the things they were intended to describe.

The book banners looked upon the world they had made, finally content that there was nothing left to burn, and turned their attention outward, seeking new concepts to destroy. New children were born, not knowing what was already gone as they grew through nursery school to kindergarten. Their curriculums at that stage had barely changed, were still filled with friendship and sharing and good manners, and if there were fewer loving families or fumbled first kisses than would have been present for past generations, they had no way of knowing that was so.

They finished kindergarten and took their first steps into the unknown country of first grade, big kids now, putting on their big kid backpacks and clutching their big kid pencil cases and entirely unaware of what they didn’t know, what they weren’t going to be told.

They were exactly like all the children who had come before them. They were entirely unique, and like no one else that had ever walked or laughed or run into the golden afternoon. And in that regard as much as any other, they were the same as it has ever been. They were humanity enduring, self-limiting and infinite all at once, and they didn’t know what they didn’t know. Humanity, when all is said and done, never has.

Heidi Martin was seven years old, smart and clever—which any first-grade teacher would be happy to explain are not actually the same thing, for all that they can seem very similar from a distance—and had no idea how much effort had been expended over the past decade to keep her from being exposed to concepts her parents might not have approved of. Or even concepts that they had already approved of, but which had been governmentally assessed as more appropriate for the home. She was among the first wave of children to be entering the public school system entirely under the new system of censorship, and while she might not know what she didn’t know, she was in many ways no different than any of the children who had come before her. A little sweet, a little sour, a bit of a pleasure to have in class and a bit of a brat, she was in all ways and all regards, human, and that was all that truly mattered.

Her teacher was a worried-looking woman with a pale band of skin on one finger where her wedding ring had been removed—following the laws which said it was better to leave all signs of entanglement at home, where they couldn’t attract innocent questions and official censure—who read the names off her attendance sheet with a shaking voice and didn’t make eye contact. Her own name, which would not stay with Heidi long enough to make an impression, was Miss Adams, and she had been teaching long enough to see things change more dramatically than she could ever have imagined, despite the fact that she was not yet thirty years old.

To Heidi, of course, she was unimaginably old, an inhabitant of that long stretch of adulthood that lay between “babysitter” and “grandmother.” Sixteen and sixty are all the same to a seven-year-old, bright and fresh and yet unbruised by the vagaries of the world. Heidi answered promptly when her name was called, and sat in her desk, full of squirming and excited questions that bubbled through her like the carbonation through a can of soda pop. A pop was a rare treat reserved for only the very best of days, and school was still new and exciting enough to feel the very same way: like a rare and precious treat.

Miss Adams, who had already seen a hundred Heidi Martins come and go, watched her and felt tired on her behalf, all too aware of the series of trials ahead of her, the small humiliations and carefully aimed blows intended to crush her innocent curiosity and amazement and render them into things that could be packaged more palatably. She smiled for the girl with all the sincerity she could muster and thought, not for the first time, that she was going to leave teaching for a safer job at the end of the year.

Heidi smiled back, unaware of the shadows lurking behind her teacher’s seemingly sincere expression, and set herself about the business of learning with all the enthusiasm of a hare raiding a farmer’s unguarded garden. She wasn’t always reliable about her homework—she was, after all, a child—but she consumed every bit of information she could get her hands on, and she seemed to understand it well.

Too well, at times. By the end of the year, she had started asking uncomfortable questions about things that seemed to be missing from the material. None of the stories they read had families in them, for one thing, no parents, no close relations. There were sometimes siblings, but they were always as alone as the single children were, watched over by nebulously related adults whose authority was absolute but unexplained. It didn’t match the world as she understood it, and she had been told that school was going to prepare her for the rest of her life. What these parentless children who were flawlessly obedient to every adult they spoke to were supposed to prepare her for was less than clear, and she wanted to know the reasons why.

There were reasons, but none that Miss Adams was allowed to give her, and her excuses and attempts to evade Heidi’s increasingly frustrated inquiries were getting thin by the time the bell rang for the end of the school year. It was with an uncomfortable degree of relief that she waved goodbye to Heidi and her classmates, hoping they would find the answers they needed so desperately under the care of another teacher. Then she went back into the school and composed her resignation letter. She would find another career. One where she was asked to tell fewer lies.

Heidi crashed into the summer like a comet into the crust of the Earth, still seeking answers, still seeking understanding. There were other stories at home, hidden on high shelves and tucked into her parents’ bedroom, but she could read now, and she could still climb like the child she was, and she ferreted them out with a treasure-seeker’s skill. In those stories she found parents, often absent but still in existence, and she found kisses on cheeks and words she had to look up in the dictionary behind her mother’s desk. She found a world that was much wider and wilder and weirder than the one that was being offered to her in her classes, and she wanted to understand why.

Her parents were no help. Asking them directly about the books they tried to hide from her just resulted in those books disappearing, and her mother pleading with her to please, please, never ask those questions of anyone else, please, it could get them into so much trouble. Silence was the enemy of understanding, but it was all that she could find at home.

That need for understanding followed her through second grade and all the way through elementary school, spurring her onward at an ever-increasing pace as she tried to find the reasons for the filters she could barely make out on the edges of the world. Second grade taught her that while the stories she had at home were more interesting, they weren’t safe to discuss at school; they would only get her into trouble. Third grade taught her that her peers were less interested than she was in finding the underpinning reasons why: Trying to engage them in her quest would only get her tattled on to teachers who were less understanding than Miss Adams had been.

Fourth grade was when she unlocked the secret truth behind it all, that adults had decided for her what she was and was not allowed to know about the world she had to live in, all because of their own ideas of what was “appropriate.” Since those ideas included her classmates being “inappropriate” because they used wheelchairs or crutches, or because their skin was a different color, or their brains worked a different way, she looked at this information and immediately dismissed it as nonsense. The adults who were making her choices for her didn’t know what was appropriate, because they didn’t know her, or the people around her, or what her life was really going to be like.

They didn’t know anything.

And then came sixth grade, middle school, the year she had been told by parents and teachers alike that everything would change. Middle school was big kid years, the point where she would go from baby classes to really understanding the world. Middle school was where the other kids would learn curiosity, too, and where they would join her in the quest for better answers to bigger questions, where they would challenge the adults who thought they could be made smaller, trimmed and contained like trees grown in containers six sizes too small for them. Heidi was ready to stretch her roots and her branches: She was ready to learn.

What she got instead was more of the same. More bloodless stories with characters who shared space but nothing more: By banning romance, the censors had banned even close friendship, since that could be read “the wrong way” by children who were experiencing the stirring of their first crushes. Characters were made as bland and unremarkable as possible, to avoid attachment, and excising the family structure had made that surprisingly easy. Not every story was a love story in the romantic sense, but every story had some sort of passion at the heart of it, even if that passion was for solving a puzzle or conquering an obstacle. Literature had been pressed flat.

History was similar, devoid of anything that might challenge the dominant narrative of the country they all lived in. Heidi could find no path from it to her own life: The world she lived in was a compartment, divorced entirely from its own past. Science and math were challenging, but only to a point: When they drew too close to complexity, they shied back, leaving Heidi frustrated and her classmates to lose interest. Day by day, she could see the curiosity fading from their eyes, leaving them as stoic and steady as the adults who claimed to guide them.

It wasn’t until she got access to the middle school’s library that she understood the magnitude of what had been lost. The shelves there were more than half empty, lacking the easy replacement of picture books and primers. Some of them still had labels advertising categories that no longer existed.

Some of them had been pushed back into place by resentful librarians who could excuse sloppy shelving by pointing out their lack of budget. It was one of those roughly adjusted shelves that gave her the only answer she had ever received on school property.

The Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe.

It was a heavy book, bound in some sort of cloth, with gilt letters on the cover. The stamp on the inside page said WITHDRAWN, and Heidi knew as soon as she saw it that if she showed anyone what she had found, it would be taken away. So she hid the book inside her bag and snuck it out without seeing the librarian, feeling very wicked the whole time. Feeling like she might get caught.

That night, she sat with it under her blankets, struggling to read unfamiliar words and sentences that seemed to bounce like beams of light across the page, rolling and rollicking and filled with their own inevitability. She snuck back and forth between her bedroom and the dictionary, and she learned, bit by bit, what had been stolen from her. What had been snatched away by people who had never had the right to steal what wasn’t theirs to forbid.

In the morning, before breakfast, she sat at the table and copied down the lines of the most beautiful thing she had ever seen by hand, writing them in her notebook where no one would ever be able to steal them away again. When her mother asked what she was doing, she smiled sweetly and said, “Homework,” and that was enough. That was always enough.

Heidi snuck the book back into the library that afternoon, before she could inevitably get caught. It was gone before the final bell. She never saw it again. But the damage to the plans laid by people who didn’t understand children nearly as well as they thought they did had already been done.

Across the country, there were thousands of Heidis, by all different names, all different backgrounds. Some of them were little girls, some were little boys, and some felt that they were neither, even if they lacked the vocabulary to express that feeling to the adults around them. All the laws had really stolen were the words. And all of them were going through their schooling fighting to understand, fighting to recover what should have been theirs all along.

It took another five years, but as Heidi stepped into her senior year of high school, she also stepped into the auditorium where the school board was meeting to discuss another round of limitations to the curriculum. She entered with a folder of proposed lesson plans under her arm and an impassioned demand that poetry be given back to the ones who needed it most, the ones whose hearts burned like coals in their chests from the absence of oxygen to fan their inner fires, the ones who needed so very badly to burn.

She carried all those things with her, but when she stepped up to the microphone for her turn to talk, the words that left her mouth belonged to someone else, long ago and far away and buried in the silence. The words the people in authority had tried to snatch away from her, the words that had helped her to see the path that would lead her through the rest of her days:

“And the moon never beams without bringing me dreams of the beautiful Annabell Lee,” she said, and there was so much work to be done to restore what had been stolen away, but she was ready to begin. A whole generation of new poets was ready to begin, one sonnet, one sestina, one susurrating syllable at a time.

(Editors’ Note: “Children of Calliope” is read by Erika Ensign on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 72B.)

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