They came in the library like locusts into a cornfield. Sheets were torn from the hands of librarians. They ran through the stacks with wild abandon. The library scavenger hunt began in a fury.
The circulation librarian, Brenda, said, "I seen this coming."
Eric the reference librarian told her to shut her mouth. She suggested half the damn things on the list. "Seeing something coming. Shit, it's the same every time we do anything with people pitted against each other. Like assholes to a thong."
Brenda's eye did a little twitch. Her eyebrows rose. She liked Eric but at that moment he might lose his life. Maybe just a finger or six. He could point toward the bathroom with a single finger. In her quiet time in the back of her mind, Brenda believed the adult reference department was useless. Adults never needed help with anything these days unless it was how to print and that idiot Freddy the page could tell them how to do that. Not that Freddy was an idiot. But Brenda thought he was.
"What's the prize?" a medium sized child asked Brenda.
Brenda smiled. "It's to help you learn the library."
The child frowned. "So there's no prize?"
"No. Just learning the library. Seeing if you can do it before your friends."
"That's stupid." The child balled up the paper with the scavenger hunt instructions and dropped it on the floor.
Eric took a step back and decided to go upstairs. Brenda came around the desk, leaned over, and picked up the trash and dropped it in the can a few feet from the child. Brenda then pointed towards the children's department. The child sighed and attempted to make a slow walk away as if it was the youth's own inertia guiding her rather than Brenda's fury.
An older man, Earl, stepped up with the scavenger hunt page in hand. "So what's the prize?"
Brenda smiled sweetly at the man. After a quick conversation, Earl realized that while knowledge was power, so was the fist of an angry librarian when asked for yet more free shit. Earl decided to pivot and ask about the scavenger hunt page.
"Where would I find… a cookbook by a local author?" he said.
Brenda said upstairs, part of the special collections with the local materials. "Called the
"Local Studies Collection. It's in nonfiction, has all the books by locals."
"I didn't know we had one of them," he said.
"That's the point of the scavenger hunt."
"To make people check out local shit?"
"Most of that can't be checked out. To make you know it's there."
"So it's there, but I can't check it out. What's the damn point?"
"Earl, you wanna have kids?"
"Hell no. They smell and ask stupid questions."
Brenda said, "Go away or I'll beat you to death with a dictionary."
"Feisty. Look that word up and I'll find a picture of you," Earl said and left her alone.
Brenda shuddered and turned to the next patron asking about the scavenger hunt. They were all children. Especially the adults. The adults just had more experience.