Nursing in Study Room B

Study Room B holds many secrets. People say that if walls could talk, they would tell all our stories. The walls of Study Room B would scream.

I've been the librarian here for six years, since the building came to be and that goddamn study room is evil. Damn evil.

But I can only tell you what I've seen. The blood leaking from small bodies. Intestines spooling out and roping on the coarse carpet. Pizza stains from a delivery gone wrong.

We have to keep the room open. When we close it, a parent or a student complains. This time we got it closed down for an entire week before Nancy Travis complained.

A nursing student, Nancy complained to her father who then complained to a member of the board that there was a study room nobody ever used. The mean librarian, that's me, had told Nancy she could not be in there alone. The last time someone was alone in there the screams interupted story time downstairs.

Nancy smiled a little smile of as I unlocked the door and let her in. Red hair done up tight in a braid that fell to her shoulder.

Please, I said to her again. I can let you use the quiet study area.

I need to be on the phone, she said and closed the door. We looked at one another through the window. I had an idea of reaching out, touching the glass, but she would think it was a joke.

I was helping Mrs. Kemper find a newspaper article when the glass broke. A hard shattering of a chair and the breaking of wood. Screaming. Nancy screaming.

She made it halfway through the window. They found her braid nailed to the ceiling. Her nursing books torn apart. The pages spread all over, falling like snow.

I called the proper people. Authorities. Not very authoritative. The cop threw up and the ambulance driver kept wondering where the thing went to. The thing that got poor Nancy Travis.

When the reporter came around asking, I said there were no witnesses. I didn't tell him about the other times. He wouldn't write about them. He never did.