Still working on the first draft of Brewed Awakenings. I will return to posting short stories January 15th. Until then, please enjoy these humorous excerpts from my novel about coffee that makes people disappear.

Libraries are one of the greatest inventions of mankind, and I am counting all inventions that have so far been invented, including the interrogation skeleton patented by Helene Adelaide Shelby in 1927. It was a ghastly invention that made a skeleton appear to form out of thin air in an interrogation room, in order to scare confessions out of criminals. While not very practical, it definitely gains points for style.

So even with inventions like that, the library is definitely one of the best. A library is a a building, or maybe a section of a building, that contains many many books on a variety of subjects and topics. These books are usually organized in such a way that it makes it easier to find a book that you are looking for. Originally this was done by organizing books into categories, and then by using little cards to show which section any given book might be in. Now, at the front of the Toledo library there are several computers where you can type in a book in order to find where it would be placed. There are also several librarians in each library, who, although they contain frightening power and immense superhuman strength, they are actually quite helpful and friendly.

On that Monday, there were many people there finding out the information that they needed to learn for their various tasks. For instance, Christina Jonas was looking for a novel. She was taking a course at Toledo University on the English translation of the Bible. She needed to find a novel that in some way took a story from the Bible and did something unique with it. This was for the final paper of that class. She heard about a comedy book written about Jesus’s best friend, and how they went on a wacky adventure to find the three wise men. It’s a fun book, highly recommend it.

Freddy Gomez however was looking for something a little different. He was both a chef and politically an anarchist. He was hoping to find ethical recipes in order to fit his political ideologies and lead a life closer to his goals. He heard of a book that seemed to match that exact niche. It seemed like a recipe book for those who were against hierarchies, but in reality, it actually only included instructions on how to commit various forms of vandalism and how to make certain explosives. This one I cannot legally recommend.

Wesley Percival was a professor of abnormal psychology who was looking into a man of a peculiar bend that he recently found in one of his textbooks. A sort of obscure local celebrity. This man, Paschal Beverly Randolph was a local sex magician, and no, I will not explain. He passed long ago, but Wesley wanted to find out more about him, trying to see if he could find any local newspapers or records that could point out some of his history in the area before he moved to Philadelphia. He would eventually find out that Paschal’s son, Osiris Buddha Randolph was buried in a nearby graveyard. He then began to research which kind of flowers would be appropriate to leave on the grave.

Karl Pratt however was looking into books about reincarnation and how you can tell who you were in a past life. He was interested because he recently found out about a local obscure celebrity, a sort of sex magician, and was fairly certain he was one of Karl’s past lives.

Naomi Torres was in the library that day in order to find out information about a local group of, well, somebodies, called the Circle of Outkasts. She knew next to nothing about these folks except that for some reason Lily had a piece of paper on when they would next meet. This alone was worthy of investigation to her.

See, she was the kind of person who wanted to help others, and she was convinced that finding out more about Eric’s missing girl that she would help Eric. If nothing else, she could find out that she wasn’t real and she could help Eric let go of his weird mysteries.

She walked up to the front desk to a librarian rolling up her sleeves, showing her well muscled forearms. “Whew, it’s a bit hot in here today, isn’t it?” said the librarian, trying to make conversation with her new customer.

Naomi pulled at the collar of her black t-shirt that had the phrase, “by any beans necessary” written in white above a wiggly drawing of a coffee cup in the shape of a skull. It was a shirt she printed out about 20 copies of because she was convinced this would be the last name Eric would choose for the coffee shop. “Haha, yeah, it sure is. A little toasty.” She blushed, almost audibly.

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