Courier¶
I wrote this in college in my third year—extrapolating the year from the notebook I found it in. I had the Doe Library North Reading Room in mind for the setting.
On re-reading it and typing it up nine years later, I quite liked it. I have not written dialogue in years, so typing the dialogue felt weird. It was also jarring to realize that the Encyclopædia Britannica is no longer published. Outside some punctuation fixes, I only made two changes:
I changed from gendered pronouns to neutral pronouns. I didn’t like the connotations that gendered pronouns gave the interaction between the writer and the librarian.
It was originally titled “Times New Roman,” rather than “Courier.”
I was sitting at the reference desk when I heard the most peculiar sound. It was like a typewriter but more fluid and ... organic. Standing up, I looked around the reading room. The noise seemed to be coming from my left, near the encyclopedias. This is a library, so I walked over to see if I could put a stop to it.
The person at the end of the encyclopedia counter must have been causing it, tapping the floor or some such thing. I asked, "Excuse me, but we have a no-noise policy."
They looked up, startled, and said, "Oh. I was just leaving." They got up and left. I noticed that the Britannica was out of order and spent a minute fixing it.
When I finished, I looked over at where they had been sitting. They had left their journal. It was an ordinary, spiral-bound notebook. I glanced at it, looking for some clue as to their identity. They had left off in mid-sentence; the writing was perfect Courier.
