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, and typing the dialogue brought me back. 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.
