"'Sblood, forsooth," I muttered. "These scalawags will be the death of me, upon my soul."
Another shriek. Zani came over, copper curls aflame with indignation.
"There's a situation," she said, half a brownie stuck in her teeth, the other half spewing in my direction. "There's a situation, Greg!!"
I shielded my face and regretfully put down my parchment.
"What?" I said.
"Why are you burning candles at the circulation desk?"
"Uh.... it's for my glaucoma?"
"Anyway those children are running around and shrieking. Is that right?" Zani gently placed her face against mine. "IS THAT RIGHT IN THE LIBRARY?!?!"
"Well, Karen likes it this way."
"I'm sorry, but I work at other libraries and that kind of ruckus is not tolerated." Bits of food bounced off my face and hit her before bouncing off me a final time. "IT'S NOT TOLERATED!!!"
"Yeah."
"Well? Can you hear it? It's awful! Can't you go over there and do something? I've already told them to knock it off, but they won't listen to me," Zani said, clearing the cookie crumbs from her copper eyelashes.
"Fine."
I went over to the criminal moppets and gave them a moue of mirthlessness. Since I outweighed the oldest by about two-hundred and twenty pounds, the rapscallions hushed themselves right good.
"Am I in trouble?" said the oldest with moist Dickensian eyes.
"Aye. It's off to the boot blacking factory for the lot of you."
"What?"
"Uh, keep it down."
The parents were located and all was well in Christenlibrarydom again. I was intrigued by the strange assortment of book materials on the shelves.
"What... are these?"
Zani looked at me. "The books?"
"They're so... small."
Zani explained along with the weather that those were children's books. I had not ventured into the children section for aught near a Swithin's past. How odd they all were. How odd.
I was perusing a clutch of them, thinking to repose in quiet contemplation once more, when I heard a prolonged shriek.
"Oh, no."
Zani shrugged. The kids were quiet. The shriek actually came from Karen's office. She rushed out and summoned me with an unscholarly bellow.
"What's wrong?"
She led me back to her office. I was startled to see it was bare. All the children's artwork had been taken down, along with practically everything else. Gone were the family pictures and the miniature statue of her late father-in-law, the rodeo king. Gone was all the crazy crap everywhere. Gone was the perilous sense of boundary violation. The office looked like a monk's cell. I smiled.
"Don't worry," Karen said. "It looks strange. But I heard that at the skip meeting of which I was not to hear details about that I had a 'chaotic' management style, so I decided to make the office look more professional."
"Huh," I said. "Is that why you were shrieking?"
"What? Oh, I just do that. You know that!" Karen laughed and wound up for a hearty punch on my shoulder--but then stopped herself. "No. No. I'm not supposed to touch people anymore. I'm going to be a good manager from now on. Yes, good manager. Good. Yes." Karen nodded. "Yes. Good. Uh-huh."
"You seem a little... off."
"It's been a hard few weeks. Months. Years. Deca--"
"Got it. Well, I think I've found just the thing to chase your phlegmatic mood away. There're books in the children's area! Did you know?"
I held out the first.
"I'm very interested to learn how Erin Soderberg gets around the whole opposable thumb issue. But this looks great, doesn't it?!"
Karen sighed. Spurning the bespectacled puppy pirate, she ruefully contemplated the Sartrean blankness of her office walls. Just then Jonah popped in.
"What's going on?" he said.
"Nothing. I'm just making some discoveries. Here, this is a good one for you. You're into light bondage, aren't you? Breathplay?"
Jonah looked at my haul of children's books with Hegelian wonder. We devolved into a dialectic about the technouterine multiform polysynchronicities when I felt a hard punch on my shoulder.
"Hey, no touching!"
"Sorry, sorry!" Karen said. "It's so hard to change! Anyway, get out."
"Me too?" Jonah said.
Karen held up a playful fist. Jonah and I fled to our candletechnic sphere, ha ha.
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