Member-only story
Time Traveling Murder Mystery
The librarian was staring at me, as only librarians can. Right through me, thoroughly and completely. She was reading me like a book, you could say. I found it mildly disturbing, and most rude. All the many times I had stridden valiantly up to that very counter, I cannot remember another time as uncomfortable as that! The silence of the library was unnerving. I felt vertigo coming on. Someone coughed in the loft area, and I was never so grateful for a human body function.
I stood there at the book counter, as a grown man and yet a child, there before that sharp-nosed woman. Her thickly bespeckled eyes squinting accusingly at me, as the wrinkled lippy nest of her mouth unfolded. Her voice was like fingernails down a blackboard. I winced.
“Are you sure this one is the one that you want?” she scraped out of her throat, with a look of disdain. She tippy tapped a yellowed fingernail on the top book of my chosen pile. “Yes, please,” I chimed, as if she had just offered me a chocolate.
She lifted the top book slowly, as if it were a ticking time bomb. Yes, be gentle old woman, I thought, as my eyes followed it. I was smitten with that book; from the very moment I saw her! The book had a teasingly slippery, clear cover, to protect it’s delicious innards, that I adored, from the minute I touched it on the shelf. One of its many charms. It played hard…
