I refused to be interrupted when a youngish woman wearing wire-rim granny glasses and lavender braids sat in the chair beside mine.

“I like to be close to the lamp,” she explained, taking a brazen peep at my laptop screen. 

“Ooh, writer alert,” she said, somewhat adorably. “Me, too.”

I stiffened, rearranging my paperwork, then put in earbuds just as she uttered what I hoped would be her last sentence of the day: “I’m working on a novel,” and pointed to her spiral. Of course, she was. Hopefully, she hadn’t recognized me. Likely, though, she had.

“What are you writing?” she asked, but I pointed to my earbuds. I dared not smile for fear she would misinterpret the warmth as a come-on. I had not precious energy to spare for even the briefest dalliance. At my age, maintaining an erection requires my full brain and sometimes a pill. I wondered if there was something to add to my piece about the cluelessness of younger generations.

I’d been drafting since morning and was nearing the end of an intense op-ed on the national shootings that involved seemingly innocuous missteps on the parts of the victims: going to the wrong front door, opening the wrong car door, turning up a mistaken driveway. Then bang. An essay about kindness, I thought, and notions of etiquette and basic human decency, all of that destroyed in the wake of the global pandemic and under the idiotic gaze of Donald Trump, and—the part that was eluding me—how we might begin to get it back. This sturdy antique library table had been lucky for me before. Call me superstitious. A writer of the people—and for the people—I complete all first and second drafts in public settings.

The woman promptly withdrew a self-consciously anachronistic quill-and-ink set from her knapsack and began jotting in a script that was both impossibly beautiful and illegible—like a calligraphy of the future. Her focus, or her ability to pretend to focus, struck me as impressive. 

The next time I saw her at the same public library, she introduced herself as Vivienne Farr. I gave in and chirped, “How do you do?” This day, her wet hair was dyed gray, and we were thrown together because it was raining and the library had become crowded with damp, homeless people whom I believed would benefit from my op-ed. I still didn’t have an ending, so I was letting it percolate while I redrafted a sonnet about quiet versus chaos. 

When the lights went out, the unified gasp intrigued me. I put that into my poem. Vivienne pulled from her bag a candle in glass and fired a lighter shaped like a gun. 

“From Goodwill,” she said, introducing herself to a homeless woman who’d woken. 

“Is that vanilla?” I asked astutely, her reward for leaving me alone thus far that day. 

“Vanilla,” she said, frankly but flirtatiously. More than a few student evaluations have deemed me a silver fox. Then, “What are you writing?”

“Notes,” I said. It’s true: I make notes. I’m making notes now.

“Awesome,” Vivienne offered.

“Several degrees shy of awesome,” I said, flashing an unguarded smile, microscopic compared to hers.

“I’m writing–” 

“A novel!” I exclaimed, holding a finger to my lips. “Onward!”

In a wholly uncharacteristic move, I high-fived her.

I fastened my earbuds and was moved to return to the op-ed. I had decided to reference the generally polite decorum of strangers in public settings and even to pat myself on the back for my own beyond civil behavior in this instance with the relentlessly forward Vivienne. 

The last time I saw Vivienne, the library was virtually empty on a sunny Sunday. She wore a cleavage-baring tank dress and high-tops, took a seat at a table alone near a checkout desk—so close but blessedly too far for me to ogle her pert bosoms—and presumably began to draw curlicues. I’d finished my op-ed and emailed it to an editor to whom I’d been referred. Responding promptly, the editor requested “a novel concrete example” as to how one might better demonstrate civility and even compassion toward strangers.

“An old-fashioned, ‘How-do-you-do.’ Or even a high-five. It’s all in there!” I emailed.

“I said a novel concrete example,” emailed she.

Stumped, I took out my own spiral, an impulse buy, and listed words that came: straps, sneakers, inkwell. 

Just before noon, a sad-looking man in his fifties stomped into the library. I took literal note of his pale ponytail. He dumped the contents of a sack at a librarian’s station. He sought a certain book, but that was not to be, not until he paid his fine, the fortyish brunette librarian explained. 

“Fuck you,” he told her. As Vivienne audibly tsked-tsked the rudeness, I tried to meet her eyes.

The librarian didn’t speak, but her face reflected his imperative. 

Very soon, the man we now know to be Marvin Tremont withdrew a handgun. As has been reported, he was an excellent shot. The brunette librarian fell just before I took cover, half a minute before the guard tiptoed in. I heard the other librarians Tremont killed, two in a row, their screams, their barks of pain. I didn’t hear Vivienne when she dropped, killed almost instantly. She’d been clutching her notebook, hurling herself toward my table—my lucky table—beneath which I crouched until the guard wounded Tremont. Once Tremont was down, writhing in his own pain, I surprised myself by retrieving Vivienne’s notebook from the floor, each page a thing of artistry unto itself, though gobbledygook to me—or so I thought. 

Later, at home, examining it closely, I made out the phrase, Several degrees shy of awesome. My line. She’d added three superfluous exclamation points—the lines slanted, almost jagged—clearly comparing herself negatively to me. 

Dear Vivienne’s alien calligraphy made it into my poem on the shooting, which I have placed in a top-tier journal. The op-ed I’ve put on hold, though it does nag.