Stories by Louis Urbanowski

Patty still typed around three hundred words a minute. 

In her heyday it was closer to four. 

Being a stenographer fit like a glove that wrapped around rapid digits. Not that she got to wear it anymore.

A pile of books slammed onto the counter, demanding her attention. Patty peered over the top of her half rim spectacles, reaching for them, as a man waggled his membership card at her. 

Eyeing the covers, Patty raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh, Ulysses, really?’

‘Sorry?’ The man smiled back. Troy Reeder, according to his card.

Patty tapped on her keyboard, so fast it sounded like a drill. 

‘This is a challenging text, Troy. I’ve read it multiple times, written a few elective essays on it.’

He stared back, vacant. The personification of a shrug.

Patty continued, tracing a finger over her screen. ‘From what I can see here, you’ve never read anything like this have you? I suggest you’d be better off with something lighter.’

‘Lady, my course says I need to read it, so I gots to read it.’ A sigh, punctuating his reply. 

Patty rested her chin on her hands. She offered counsel.

‘But do you want to? Because if you don’t want to, then James Joyce will be like a foreign language. Trust me.’

Troy rubbed his head, hesitating before replying. 

‘It’s in English right?’

Patty laughed. ‘No, that’s not the point. I don’t think you’re ready for this.’

‘Look, I got practice in half an hour. Can you scan my books and keep your nose out of my business please. Just do your job.’ Troy stiffened as he spoke. 

Patty scrunched her face for a millisecond before giving up. She knew his type, JK Rowling would be a slog for his brain. Joyce will shut it down completely.

Scanning the books, and handing them back to the man, she watched him walk away. 

‘Excuse me, you know Joyce wrote Ulysses to challenge the reader, yes?’

A woman appeared at Patty’s counter. She must have been nestled in amongst the shelves. She was diminutive, with great big blue eyes.

‘I heard you talking to that man. You wrote essays on Ulysses? That’s interesting. What did you think of the themes?’

Patty nodded her head. Another burst on the keyboard. 

‘Sorry just closing that man’s file. Well, yes the themes. Take your pick really. I enjoy how he plays with the concept of paternity. Both sides of the journey as Bloom searches for a son, and Stephen for a symbolic father.’

The woman just smiled as she nodded rhythmically. 

Patty’s shoulders tensed, she filled the silence with more. 

‘Also, you know, the parallels with Homer’s Odyssey, taking a mundane day in Dublin and comparing it to a Greek Epic is quite something.’

The woman kept nodding, then tapped the counter in front of her. Her eyes were quite something.  

‘That is correct. You’re clearly well read. Almost like a database. Nice to meet you Patty!’

The deskphone rang before Patty could respond. She swivelled in her chair to pick it up. 

Static, nothing, the third time this week. Midmorning each time, she’d have to tell her boss, Chris. Not that he would care. 

Patty turned back to the woman, but she was gone. Must have slipped out when the phone rang. Glancing down she noticed her name badge on the floor.

The line was empty now, the library quiet, Patty was left in peace. 

A far cry from her days touring the state’s courts. The drama and intensity always acted as fuel for her creative fire. 

She got away with embellishment at first. A little bit of pathos in the defendant’s testimony here, a sprinkle of motivation with a witness there. 

In retrospect adding an emotional B plot to the manslaughter case was a step too far. 

The work was flawless, it just washed upon jagged shores of ignorance and sparkling density. That metaphor got away from her.  

Still, the life of a librarian offered modest charms. It was quiet, undemanding and allowed her all the time in the world to think for herself.

The perfect crucible to craft a world of her own. Other people’s stories were too inflexible, too written. 

The opus of her life would be right along. It turned out thinking for herself was a bit of an issue.

She presumed she just needed to type. Words flowed from her fingers like bullets from a gun, afterall. 

But the issue was the source of the words. Other people’s stories were too inflexible, but at least they existed. A baseline from which to tinker, and redraft. 

Coming up with ideas on your own? Well Patty lacked inspiration. 

The answer was like a bark rattling around in her mind. She should read more. It was true, but it didn’t make it any easier. 

The irony of being a librarian who physically struggled to read long form. A life spent typing in shorthand had rendered her resistant to literature. 

No matter. She deployed her talents to cover her weakness. Smart right? If she needed to understand a book, a quick burst on the keyboard and there it was – the cliff notes, a bitesize summary of what she needed. 

As long as she was at her counter, Patty could be the well read librarian who was always on the cusp of creation. 

A dream couldn’t be over if you never started it.

A chill brought Patty a shiver. 

‘That blasted thermostat.’ She muttered, as she stood from her chair. 

Another item ignored by Chris. 

The control was at the other end of the ground floor, past crime, just before sci-fi. If you hit biographies you’ve gone too far. The shelves were pristine, even after the busy morning that the man and woman from earlier represented.

There was that one Friday when Fifty Shades came out, but that was an outlier. The lucky few who got a copy left a disappointed horny dozen for Patty to deal with. 

‘Get the audio book,’ Patty advised, ‘hands-free after all.’ A great joke, underappreciated by the hicks of this local town. 

Patty pinged open the cover of the thermostat. Seventy-two degrees. That couldn’t be right, it was chilly. She found a radiator behind a table and felt it, burning hot. This place was backwards. Cold when it should be hot, phones that rang by themselves. A dusty reflection of a life falling by the wayside. Patty liked that, she’d include that in her work, when she got around to starting. 

Back to the counter to call Chris, let him have it with both barrels. The human mouth typically produced one hundred and fifty words per minute. About half of what her fingers could manage, but sometimes the spoken word was just a better stress release. 

Passing through crime fiction again, she stopped at an empty section of shelves. She must be losing it. It was fine, pristine in fact, just a minute before. Maybe a book had fallen and caused a literary avalanche. 

Patty looked around her, nothing on the floor. Everything else was in place, but some were missing. She could almost count on two hands the amount of books out on loan at the moment. There were about ten missing here, was someone in the library? Planning to loan out half of the ‘G’ crime authors. Whatever got people to sleep at night. 

She was about to leave it, when something caught her eye. At the back of the shelf, a little bit of plastic was stuck into the beige coloured flimsy metal of the shelf. 

Pat

Lib

It was her name badge. Her brain stalled. She picked it up off the floor a few minutes ago, it was tagged to her blouse. 

No it wasn’t. Patty looked down and it wasn’t there. This defied explanation. It was rammed, almost merged fully into the shelf. She gave it a tug, nope, that was stuck. 

‘Excuse me?’

A voice from behind her, she recognised it. Turning she saw the woman from earlier. The one that had challenged her about Ulysses.

‘Oh sorry, what do you need? I must look like a mad lady, my head stuck in this shelf.’

‘That was my fault. I am still struggling with dimensional transit. I wanted to extrapolate matter from your name plate, but error, I’ve fused it.’ 

‘I don’t understand.’ Patty felt her cheeks redden.

The woman’s voice dropped an octave. ‘You’re well read. We need a guide.’

‘A guide for what?’ Patty’s right foot started to move backward. An uneasy tension filled the air. 

Noticing it the woman raised a hand. Except it wasn’t a hand, it was a flat black panel. An impossible tablet where her hand should have been.

‘Please do not be alarmed. We seek a guide. No, that is not the correct translation.’ She closed her eyes, Patty could see those huge eyelids bulge. ‘Database.’ 

Patty’s mind was racing. ‘Oh Google? Sure you can use my computer, it’s at the front. I’ll go get it loaded up.’ Patty went to move, but she found her legs stuck. They felt like heavy jelly, like they were sliding into the floor and merging with the carpet. 

‘It will be pleasant. We will use your sentient knowledge of this world to study it. Placated, sedated, a pleasant trip for you.’ 

‘Me? I’m just a librarian.’

‘Define: Librarian. Responsible for administering and assisting the preservation of knowledge.’ The woman’s voice harboured a profound robotic tone now. 

‘Oh that? It’s just a trick. I google the books. I skim the wikipedia entry. I’m a typer. I type real fast, I don’t like reading that much. Barely finished Harry Potter.’

‘We assessed you. You passed, every answer correct. Humility is a human performative trait. In our controlled test, you displayed anti-humility. Error: translation correction.’ The eyelids pulsed again. 

‘Correction: you were smug with knowledge. You suggest corrections. Preparing connection, we will now leave this world. We have our database. Patty The Librarian.’

Patty felt a cold force yank her like a weak pulley.

The library fell silent once more. 

By Louis Urbanowski – Inspired by the prompt: ‘The smug librarian’