Medieval medicine take up a whole shelf. Splendid. Not one, single book can give you a comprehensive rundown. Twenty will tell you the same thing, slightly rephrased, so you’ll think you’re learning but you’re only aging. Having never been to the reference floor, you’ve been picturing a wooden stand under a spotlight: on it, a tome as tall as an oil painting. It had dead flies between the pages and a brown fabric cover stained with kerosene. No doubt.

But the library has ample lighting and plastic-jacketed plentitude. The indignity.

            While your dissertation explores the intersection of religion and science during the English Renaissance, you’re thankful to live in a time that prescribes Ritalin for hyperactivity rather than drowning you—the general ‘you’ or just you—in a barrel. People nowadays have compassion. Or they need the barrels for whiskey. Both valid.

            There!

            Among the wet-looking spines of the Med. Med. shelf, you spot a fat volume in red leather. What an elegant slut. Whether it knows of fleams and the four humors, it has you smitten. You tuck the book under your arm, proud of your spontaneity. You haven’t even looked at the title. Looking would compromise the find, activating a stroke-of-midnight reversion from something perfect like [LITERALLY EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO WRITE A KICKASS DISSERTATION THAT WILL WIN YOU RESIDENCIES SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO BUS TABLES AGAIN] to something silly like Early Surgical Approaches to Arrow Extraction.

            When you open the book, you discover the life writings of a midwife during the Dark Ages. The epoch is off, but the drawings are ghastly. You trace them and color them and hang them in the living room so that company will be impressed. But first you need company. And it’ll help if you stop saying company, like an old-fashioned housewife mooning out the window. But you haven’t time for [company], not with your dissertation, and the red book gets recalled by the library. Someone else wants it.

You’ll kill them.

            No, you won’t. You’ll feel glum and protective, and after a respectful two days you’ll recall it from them. And maybe they’ll try to kill you. But they’ll have to come over. And then they’ll see the drawings on the wall, the green vulvas and flaming fetuses, and they’ll marvel at your talent, beg to patronize you, and you won’t have to bother with the dissertation after all.