(The following is an excerpt from a short story published in The Running Wild Anthology of Stories, Vol 5.)

Anna gripped the banister of the university library’s vertiginous staircase with the same white-knuckled power she’d discovered during her turbulent transatlantic flight. She felt the bottom drop again as she reached the ground-floor helpdesk, now grasping nothing more substantial than a flimsy slip of paper, wet with her sweat.

Anna had inscribed the words on a sheet from the hotel pad before she’d started out today, in case she lost the power of speech or failed to contort her Virginia accent into something more understandable, if not more palatable, to her English addressees. She’d already mispronounced Birmingham twice since she’d arrived, once at Heathrow customs and once at Euston station, her thick tongue reluctant to renounce the Alabama namesake.

The bemused librarian glanced over what she’d written. Abena Amina. Imperatives in Omotic Languages. PhD Thesis, University of Birmingham, 1985.

“We don’t hold hard copies of theses here anymore. They’re all sent to the British Library.”

“Can you tell me how to get there?” Anna whispered, like a frightened child.

“It’s in London,” was the response. “But you don’t go to the British Library to access an archived thesis, you write to request it. They scan it and email it to you.”

Anna imagined a less foolhardy version of her past self, discreetly filling out an online form from her work computer in Roanoke, scrolling through the returned digital file later that evening while Rich graded papers, unaware. In a flash of hindsight she saw the tensions on their budget and marriage erased, never forming.

Shame pressed against her like a blinding wall of fire. She blinked. Her interlocutor’s face appeared now as a blur of purposeful motion, silhouetted against imagined flames. “The departments sometimes hold onto the bound copies,” she conceded, and made a few phone calls. The campus map she eventually handed Anna held the clues to the next stage in her ill-planned scavenger hunt. A name scrawled in the margins: Adam Draper. A circle drawn around one of the buildings: Frankland.

The Frankland Building, it turned out, housed a neglected repository of doctoral theses from days gone by. They’d been piled unceremoniously onto the sagging shelves of the cluttered psychology postgrad room. Adam Draper was the psychology postgrad who’d been tasked to serve as guide to the uninvited American visitor.

Anna spotted the volume within minutes, retrieving it from among scores of gold-embossed maroon spines, half-hidden behind the misshapen blades of a Venetian blind caked with layers of dust. Its heft spoke of a mystery soon to be revealed. She pulled the tome to her and hugged it to her chest, as if it were a child she’d forgotten, returned to her fully grown.

“There must be something rather valuable in there,” Adam said, and Anna realized he’d witnessed this devastatingly vulnerable scene. Her lips moved to excuse her behavior, but no words formed there. The vertigo she’d felt in the library still pulled at her, but now with a singly directed propulsion – a force that would not allow itself to be squandered on unnecessary words.

She’d not released her grip on her prize. “Do I sign this out or something?”

“Well… the thesis isn’t really supposed to leave the postgrad office. But you can stay and read it for as long as you like. I was planning on working in here today anyway.”

So her guide became her silent companion as she plunged into the secrets of Imperatives in Omotic Languages.

Read the rest of “Go” in The Running Wild Anthology of Stories, Vol. 5.

Would you like to know more about this story? Watch the video I made about it. I also discuss “Go” in Episode 67 of Structured Visions.