After a few awkward seconds where I try to remember what was coming out of his mouth a moment ago instead of what I would like to stick into it, I blink and stutter, “Er, s-sorry, professor. What was the question?”
His eyes close for the briefest of moments as a frown overtakes his face, but then it’s gone. As though it were never there. “See me after class.” He turns back to the board and points at a picture of an old—ancient, actually—drawing of a baby-likecreature with wings. “Can anyone else tell me the first time we documented the idea of angels?”
A few hands shoot up across the small hall, and Professor Brax breathes a sigh of relief as the chosen student answers correctly—something about a sarcophagus from the fourth century.
He rambles for another twenty minutes on how the origins of a mythic being can be helpful in determining its origin beyond our current perspective. But I’ve once again lapsed into some new fantasy featuring the very desk he’s leaning those sturdy fingers on.
Professor Brax calls the end of the lecture, and everyone files out except me until I’m alone in a room suddenly larger than it was a moment ago with the one professor I might have developed a teeny tiny crush on. (Okay, it’s the size of a planet, but who’s measuring?)
“Mr. Retter.” He rifles through his satchel to find a stapled-together essay I immediately recognize as the one I handed in at the end of the last semester. “I do not mean to be rude when I say this, but you are failing my class and I don’t understand why.” He gazes at me, a small furrow between two otherwise perfect brows, and hands me the essay covered in red ink. “You are a star student, straight As, keep out of trouble, no record of misdemeanours, yet you fail the most basic premises of this class.”
Clearly he’s never had to stare at the vision of God while trying to focus on the origins of myth. Maybe if he lectured in front of a mirror, he might understand.
“I’m giving you a second chance to make up this essay.” He closes the satchel and slips it onto his shoulder. “Rewrite it, then schedule a private tutoring session with my assistant so we can go over it. It’s clear you need some extra help, and I’d hate to ruin your stellar grades with my class.”
“I—”
“One week, though. That’s it. Or you fail.”
Clearing my throat, I wrangle my thoughts into some semblance of professionalism by the will of a mystic deity (because I don’t know how I otherwise achieved such a feat). “Yes, professor. Thank you.”
“I’ll see you next week, then.” He holds open the door, follows me down the stairs to the building’s café, and walks out a set of double doors.
I, however, crash into a haphazardly placed chair and am forced to refocus myself. Get yourself together, Tyl. Grades. Degree. Academia. One professor cannot be that hot. But all my brain can muster in response is an image of his casual smile as he held open that door and I shifted past his smokey scent.
You got an F, I remind myself. An actual F. The closest thing to an F I’ve ever gotten in my whole life is Fine as Fuck, dubbed by my bestie when I wore a particularly snatched hot-pink dress to a mixer freshman year. Such a shame she then proceeded to puke all over it. It never did dry clean right.
I need to make up this essay somehow.
The rest of my day is clear until the party at the Theta Chi’s later, so I plan to head to the library. If I can fix my grade, then I’ll treat myself to some prime Grindr dick next weekend. That ought to shake this crush out of me.
On the sixth floor, at the very top of the old-fashioned looking building, lies a maze of shelves filled with books the librarians clearly didn’t know how to categorize. The weirdo ones. And for someone studying Mythology in Ancient Civilization, that’swhere I find myself most of the time. In the lost-and-found section of books that haven’t been updated since the stone age.
The one open in front of me, for example, has text so small I have to squint my otherwise good eyes to make out the footnotes. This course should come with a warning: Those with bad eyesight need not apply. The yellowing pages and frayed plastic protector have been touched only by dust and the rare few fingers that need its knowledge. I am, unfortunately, one of those few.
This essay on the varied beliefs of ancient Mesopotamia has me struggling to remember a single thing Professor Brax has ever said this entire year. His speciality is polytheistic religions, with an interest in those practiced during ancient eras of humanity, so his lectures are filled with theology and history students alike.
After reading through an introduction on how Mesopotamians didn’t view daemons as inherently evil, just another facet of life, I sigh. Isn’t there just a Mesopotamia Beliefs 101 textbook? That’s what they don’t tell you in school. By the time you’re doing a degree, there won’t be a textbook that hands you the answers; you’ll have to read a thousand different studies, books, and websites to glean even a basic understanding.
I push my chair out with a heaving sigh of regret that I’m missing pre-drinks with Lainey for this and go to scour the shelves one more time. At least I’m dressed and ready for later beneath this long coat.
The shelves are full of all kinds of books with a basic system even a moron could understand, yet call me moronic because I can’t seem to find the book the system says should be betweenThe Ancient ArtifactsofMesopotamiaandA Study of how Ancient Beliefs have Shaped Modern Theology. But the space is empty.
Something gleams at the back of the shelf, a shaft of light in the dark that catches my eye. That’s odd. I reach my hand back in and pat around until my fingers land on something soft with pages and raised lettering.
A book!
I yank it out of the space and frown. It’s not in English or any language I’ve seen before. Not that I’m an expert. It looks like something from a sci-fi show. I crack the black cover and frown deeper at the sight of more strange letters that seem swirled into circular paragraphs spiralling across the pages in a pattern I can’t discern.
I graze my finger across the page, tracing what I think are words, and my entire body starts to vibrate. My heels clack together, my long, took-me-an-hour-to-straighten hair flies in multiple directions, and my mouth opens to let out a silent scream as my world tumbles. Books spill into an endless void. The walls of the library disappear then reappear without the white paint and lights but with dark stone and lit sconces.
The book, I notice, is still in my hands.
The entire room smells like dust, burning embers, and that really old library I once went to on a school field trip. Nothing about this feels right. Maybe someone slipped something into my water bottle? In a library? Because that’s totally where people get dated-raped.
“There is a totally logical explanation for this,” I whisper to myself as I peak my head down an aisle of books piled on shelves so high I can’t see the top. “I just fell asleep at my desk.” Yeah, that’s got to be it.
The room is warm, which I realize quickly is because the fire in the sconces dotted around the exterior wall are pitiful compared to the roaring blaze in the hearth behind me. Stars amid the moon. I drag my arms out of my long coat and curse my forward thinking. Because I’m going to have to find a wayhome in heels and a mini-dress so tight I’m sure you can see the bottom of my ass. In fact, I know you can, because I double-checked before I left. Folding my coat on my arm and tucking the book under the other, I take a few tentative steps toward the only door I can see, my heels clacking on the stone floor.