“Look, I know this is like the fifth time in two months. I haven’t been trying to be late. I’ve just been dealing with a lot.”
Calypso was on the phone with her boss while driving.
Already late to work.
The newspaper from earlier sat open on the passenger seat beside her, the missing-person article staring up from the page.
She listened to her boss’s reply.
“Okay, well, I understand, but there have been extenuating circumstances.”
She hit the end-call button on her smartphone several times in fast succession.
Perhaps excessively.
“Fucking bitch.”
It definitely wasn’t her favorite job, but it definitely wasn’t the worst one she’d ever had either.
She liked the space. The feeling of it. The smell of the books. Having access to the library outside traditional hours had once been another perk, although apparently that was considered an infraction now.
She was fully ready to quit.
Most of the perks she’d had when she started seemed to have disappeared after management changed. Her few coworker friends had already left.
Things were getting pretty bleak around there.
She swung through a Starbucks drive-through and grabbed breakfast and a coffee.
She felt pretty well rested, aside from some guilt she still carried from yesterday.
And from years past.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
This would be her last day of work.
She hadn’t given any kind of notice. She hadn’t even fully decided until the drive over.
But after that conversation with her boss, she’d made up her mind.
She was tired of being reprimanded for the sake of being reprimanded. Tired of having long discussions about “improvement” when there wasn’t really much for her to improve.
It was a decent library, but if there were things that genuinely needed improvement, most of them were outside her control.
Anyway, the thought of leaving made her happy.
It wasn’t like she absolutely needed to stay there. It was pretty easy to get a job these days.
The part that made her hesitate was what came next.
Shit.
She’d mostly worked in grocery stores and libraries, and she didn’t particularly want to do either of those things anymore.
She was slightly afraid that was exactly where she’d end up if she didn’t find something better.
For the last several months, she’d been thinking about her interests and trying to figure out what, specifically, she could do that would bridge the gap between her deeper thoughts and awareness and some form of cash flow.
Writing had crossed her mind.
Painting.
Neither seemed particularly practical or realistic as a source of income.
Shit, she’d thought about learning construction, or just getting a labor job somewhere to start.
Practically anything would help at this point.
But she couldn’t help overthinking every idea she came up with. Something had been a mess for the last several years. For whatever reason, she’d been having a hard time moving forward.
Maybe it had something to do with the betrayal that still weighed on her.
The shift passed rather quickly.
She said goodbye to the few people she worked with whom she actually cared enough to tell. She planned to wait until the end of the day to let her boss know.
No reason to spend the rest of the shift working through that awkwardness.
Around midday, Calypso was trying to fix one of the computers. Somebody had apparently figured out how to work around the time limit and messed the thing up pretty badly.
It was extremely frustrating.
She didn’t particularly care for computers, but they were an unfortunate necessity of her job.
Computers be damned.
I’m surrounded by books, and I have to sit here and fix the computer.
That’s when she noticed him.
A kind of beat-up-looking guy, probably in his mid-to-late thirties.
Scraped-up arms.
Somewhat greasy, curly hair.
A big frown beneath a furrowed brow.
Peach-gold aviator glasses.
Black leather boots with dried mud on them.
And the most unmistakably weird aura she had ever detected.
Like a ten-foot-tall wave of purple unlight.
Then she noticed the strange little skeletal bat made of bone hanging around his neck.
Calypso quietly turned her head and resumed fixing the fucked-up computer.
A moment later, he sat down at the computer behind her.