Total pages in book: 57
Estimated words: 54848 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 274(@200wpm)___ 219(@250wpm)___ 183(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 54848 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 274(@200wpm)___ 219(@250wpm)___ 183(@300wpm)
Medusa, who was supposedly punished for her own rape.
Circe, who was sent to live alone on an island because of her sorcery.
Danae, who was locked in a tower by her father who heard a prophesy that her son would kill him one day. Not only was she locked away, but then she was relentlessly stalked by Zeus who impregnated her against her will, producing the son who would, eventually, grow to fulfill that original prophesy anyway.
There were many retellings of the classics lately, ones that explored the lives of these women, giving them the stories they’d been denied from their own perspectives.
I was hoping to not only get my students interested in the stories themselves, but also the books retelling those stories.
I just had to find a way to do that.
Hence my long nights at the library surrounded by more books than I probably needed.
“Char, girl, do you ever sleep?” Imka, one of the librarians—a tall, slender woman, with rich, dark skin, and long, micro-twisted hair—asked as she walked past with her cart.
Imka was born and spent a large chunk of her childhood in Ghana before her parents moved to the States for work. Under her subdued blue blazer, she had on a bright yellow, burnt orange, and royal blue blouse in a traditional African print.
She’d given me a scarf with an almost identical print for Christmas my first year in college, a few months after first finding me cuddled in a corner of the library, crying my eyes out with a small stack of books cradled to my chest.
In my defense, I’d been only fifteen when I’d started college, and so wholly unprepared for being out on my own, surrounded by everyone much older and more experienced than I was.
“Oh, come on, girl, you have to stop that,” she’d said, clicking her tongue. “If for no other reason than you’re going to give those books water damage.”
That had done it.
Gotten a seemingly impossible laugh out of me.
And ever since that day, Imka had been a sort of big sister figure in my life. All through the years that I’d studied, and then when I’d started working at the university as well.
“I am having trouble… relating my love of the myths to the kids,” I admitted, sighing hard.
“Perhaps because you never got to be a kid yourself,” Imka suggested, shrugging her shoulders.
Imka had told me countless stories of her own childhood that was filled with running around outside and playing games with other kids her own age.
I, well, I’d never really had that for myself.
I couldn’t tell you if that was because I’d just been born a sort of older soul, or if I’d been raised to be more mature than others. Either way, the result was the same. I had never been able to relate to other children.
Which only served to perpetuate the cycle of me spending all my time with my father and his scholarly friends, making me less and less like the other kids my age.
“I mean, I did get to be eighteen, though,” I said.
“Did you?” she asked, brows raising. “You were, what, three years into college at that point? Having lived alone like an adult since you were fifteen. How many eighteen-year-olds can say that? Most of them are still trying to figure out how to use the washing machine and do a keg stand at eighteen. But you will figure it out. If anyone can, it’s you,” she added before moving off to continue to re-stack books.
I was nose-deep in a book—realizing I was so engulfed in the content to remember I was supposed to be planning a lesson on it—when I felt a strange, prickly sensation on the back of my neck.
It wasn’t something I was familiar with. But, quite frankly, I’d read enough books to know what that usually meant.
That you were being watched, and some part of you sensed it.
Curious, my head lifted, and everything went blurry for a couple seconds before I remembered to pull my reading glasses off my nose so my eyes could adjust.
But when they did, I didn’t see anyone.
That was part of the reason I chose the part of the library I did. It was a niche, hardly-ever-used section on the second floor in a back corner. I could see everyone, but really no one could see me.
The only people I ever saw most nights were the librarians themselves, the custodians, or the occasional couple looking for a private corner to indulge in a public places kink.
I saw no shadowy figures as I looked around.
It was just the typical late-night crowd.
The big study groups had dwindled to the most dedicated of them, or the ones who needed to lift their grades the most.
I saw a younger version of myself alone by a back table in the main area. She had her slight body wrapped in black leggings and a giant camel-colored sweater to ward off the chill that you could reliably find in the library. She had two stacks of books in front of her—actual books and notebooks.