Checking Out Love

Checking Out Love (2015) R. Cooper

Jeremy Song is a graduate student who is not always good at focusing but very good about being exciting.

The problem with being one of those people fascinated by everything was that he annoyed those humans around him who didn’t think it was fun to learn and question and talk about woolly caterpillars, or geographic profiling, or shoes and ships and ceiling wax, whatever.

When he learns that a nearby library has local papers, he needs to read some of those papers.

(The Mexican general, Canales’s) teenage daughter, Rosa, had kept a diary. At fourteen or fifteen, Rosa had taken an interest in the various languages around her, from Spanish and English to the Cantonese and Pidgin English of the Chinese laborers, even the remaining Native place names, and written them all down. She had also, in between all the usual thoughts of a young girl, created her own language out of them, for a fantastic world she made up.

Unfortunately, the research librarian has quite a reputation–enough so that he is referred to as The Beast.

“We are in a library, after all. I didn’t mean to be loud, but you startled me. Don’t tell on me. I’ll be good. No need to call the Minotaur.”

The man in lavender stared at Jeremy for another moment, this time studying him from ratty sneakers to quality bag, pausing at his black leather jacket and then his beanie. “Minotaur?”

“You know, the guardian of this place? Like the Greek monster inside the labyrinth,” Jeremy explained. The lavender cardigan had one sleeve that was longer than the other. Jeremy wanted to tug the shorter sleeve until it made sense. He focused on the titles of the books in the man’s large, capable hands. The selection was pretty random for one person’s reading material. The man must have been shelving books. “Oh, you work here. You must know him. Maybe he’s not a monster. It isn’t like the Minotaur got a choice. They locked him in the labyrinth. Did you know that a maze and a labyrinth are different things, although today people use the terms interchangeably? You can get lost in a maze, but you can’t get lost in a labyrinth. Disoriented, maybe, but not lost.”

You can immediately see where this is going, but it’s still a cute short story.
Rating: 7/10

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