The Burnout, The Librarian, The Rugrat, and The Milf

CW: Mature themes and references to sexual content.

You can’t just help any kid anymore. You have to confiscate the needy ones. Trap them with gracious empathy. Bleed your aching compassion into their mushy-children souls. Be the intelligent savior they never knew they needed!

Save the children!

Please!

Please Daddy!

Please Mommy!

Evelyn flashes back to a day in her life as her parental insecurity swims down her digestive tract and creates knots of uvula, saggy breath.

“Life is meaningless,” Evelyn says with a hoarse voice, licking her fingers and flicking a page, losing her place. Evelyn is standing in the children’s reading circle, a small area near the play side of the children’s section in the library.

Evelyn anxiously flips the pages until the last 1 and clears her throat loudly. “The only truth you can ever hold lies within your tiny little children-souls. That’s why the hungry caterpillar,” She points at the cover of the book with the matching title and cute caterpillar giving innocent eyes “... keeps growing,” all the children send looks of puzzlement, as she continues, “Because the Hungry Catipillar knows the difference between sex, gender, and 1 eye-ed ideals of social conformity.” She shows the children the picture of the butterfly at the end of the book. “The end!” She says, smiling like it’s painted sympathetically with psycho-plastic.

“Spoilers!” says a boy with black hair in all different directions. He sits in front, with big brown bug-eyes, staring right at Evelyn like she’s a jewel. “Tell me another love story!” He says, as his feet are dangling off the chair and kicking the curly-haired blonde girl, picking her nose, sitting on her knees, looking at the ceiling in circles.

“Tyrone, I am not reading 50 Shades again. It’s not about the War of color between our 50 states. Might be the whitest book I’ve read… and the most damp…”

“My name is Tim,” says Tim.

“I want the truth lying to my soul!” The little blonde girl shoves Tim’s leg off her, then stomps her feet and crosses her arms in a fit.

“How about we all practice some mindful breathing?” Evelyn says. She closes her eyes and begins to say, "Everyone start by taking 1 long deep breath in…”

The little blonde girl screams.

Evelyn’s eyes shot open, fully bloodshot, like her morning alarm clock had just gone off.

2 asian twin brothers face each other, playing with their toy race cars they came into the library with. Not paying any attention to Evelyn, who looks all too serious, wearing a black and white pantsuit, with her hip cocked out and her shoulders straight, as if she’s giving an educational talk at a symposium.

A random middle schooler sits disgruntled on a sunflower bean bag. His arms crossed on his lap. His backpack is strapped tight and ready to leave at a moment's notice.

“How much do they pay you for this job?” Asks the kid with the backpack.

“Not enough,” Evelyn sighs.

“5 dollars enough to shut your pill mouth up?”

“Not appropriate!” Evelyn’s face turns red.

“You’re going to deprive me the peace of silence in a library!” The kid says, throwing his hands up.

“We read in the reading circle.” Evelyn outlines her finger, drawing an imaginary line around the reading circle.

“You preach in the reading circle. Get a real job!”

“What are you? A Republican? Where is your mother?”

“Flirting with that other librarian. I’ll give you this $5 to call it even and shut your nut-face up. I know you need lunch money. You always steal snacks from our community lunches.” The kid held the $5 out.

Evelyn paused and thought, Sadly tempting… She waved her arm and shewed the kids offer away. “You talking about Charlie?”

“The guy who makes candles,” the kid says. “She shut the car door on me when walking in here to get a head start. She’s not wearing a bra today. It's disgusting!”

“Ew!” Screamed the little blonde girl.

The Asian twins giggled.

Tim grinned all too happily.

Evelyn gasped, “Oh goodness.”

“The last few times Charlie sold her these $30 dog-shit candles that smell like when she forgets to take burnt kale chips out from the oven.”

“That’s Charlie’s candles for sure. You’ve read The Hungry Caterpillar before, right? Can you at least tell your mom you learned something from the book? Have her write me a good survey review, maybe that will get me enough of a raise and just might shut me up?”

“Unlikely… My dad is a drag queen, and my mom divorced him because he was prettier than her. I get the message. Why would you even want a survey? They can’t fire you. Who else is gonna snag this gig? Homeless Jeff?”

Homeless Jeff appears from a bookshelf and says, “I can’t sleep!” He says, opening his red eyes as his trench coat exposes very short-shorts and what used to be a shirt but is now a crop top on him, due to its small size.

“Is that your dad?” Evelyn says to the kid.

“Jesus, lady, just take the money.”

“I’ll take the money!” Homeless Jeff says.

“Get outta here, homeless Jeff!” They both say, simultaneously. Sharing a moment of sync, they didn’t know was possible.

“There are snacks and free books to read near the front, Jeff,” Evelyn tells Jeff.

“I know… I know… Just wanted a bedtime story…” Homeless Jeff frowned and walked away, slowly, lingering in Evelyn’s ever-growing guilty suffering that fell off her every waking breath.

Evelyn turns back to the kid, this time with an assertive torso of fake confidence, dripping in ego pride. “It’s a survey from your mom, or I’m reading The Little Engine that Could Next.”

“Find a book people want to read, or give us the peace of our silence for not being corrupted by your lost innocence.”

“What have you been reading, kid…” Evelyn’s posture shrank as her eyes moved down and narrowed into her messy past, turning her prophesied future into an embodied present to take the form of self-deprication living in the chambers on her quivering lips and tense, droopy cheekbones.

The kid relaxed his intensity and sighed sympathetically. “It takes 20 minutes to read Freud until you realize,” the kid said, “Freud was doing more and more cocaine to search for his asshole. Freud wound up thinking it was because he wanted to bang his parents. But really, it was because his big brain clouded his feelings and compassion into a tiny window of searching for certainty in dreams, which probably needed more sleep and relationship structure than anything else. Childhood trauma lives in feelings, but feelings are only messengers, communicators; it's your core beliefs you have about yourself that truly weigh the bidding war of how much you are placating to your self-worth’s devil’s advocate, or if you are truly being a person who is capable of failure and growth simultaneously. You can follow the messengers of feelings and play the guessing game, or you can go to the source of why you believe that who you are isn’t worth it and start there. My brain isn’t developed yet, I have time to figure out my feelings, but you? You have no excuse not to take action to find your worth. And don’t you like have to read? You're a librarian?

“I do… I do… sometimes I switch to meditating. I read for a while. Write for a while, then stop when I get creatively blocked. I don’t know, I just remember loving The Hungry Caterpillar as a kid.”

“Well, when you start reading, since it’s your job, why not read us Harry Potter? Or the Gone Series? The Hunger Games? Anything other than this woke slapstick stereotype that you reverberate back to us like you know things. If you liked reading The Hungry Caterpillar as a kid, then read it to us as-a-kid or don't. You feel me?”

Evelyn’s right eyebrow shaped a squigly question mark. “How old are you?”

“Old enough to know my mom is going to come here at least 3 times a week until Charlie finally gets the balls to ask her out. Then there are 2-3 real dates out of the apartment and 1-2 concession dates in our apartment, where I get a late impromptu sleepover at my buddy Bengee’s house. We’re gonna stay up all night and get drunk off pizza bagels, canned whipped cream, and video games. My mom will convince Charlie at some point that she is sane enough for him to move in, so she can stop working full time. Until 1 day, he will be the helpless victim of everything she has been holding inside since her 1st wedding didn’t go as planned, her fat cat left because she was too needy, and her sister got the lead part in the school play. She talks about this over the phone too much, you see, this is why these memories stay thick in her core beliefs, because she rehearses it, like an actor who needs practice to keep playing the part. All Charlie has to do is forget to change the toilet paper roll or neglect filling up the ice trays, something like that will spark decades of crazy that neither of them will see coming.”

“You got it all figured out then, huh?”

“Head knowledge is trivial. I’m sure Charlie has his version of candle crazy that I don't know about. I see life as it is. You just have to be aware. Besides, I’m going to be a professional athlete.”

“Oh yeah, at what?” Evelyn’s sassy tone was untamed.

“Wrestling. Trauma combined with steroids equals a paycheck fat enough to move out of the house at 18.”

“Sacrificing your body for money? Good idea.”

“Don’t spar with me, gumdrop. You’d pay to be a prostitute. Sex work is out of your league! Start with your pinky toes and work your way up. Someone might pay for it if you tell them you're younger than you look.”

“Excuse me!” Evelyn bit her jaw and clenched her fists.

“There is no excuse for reading us trashy books and expecting us to connect the dots and lines of gender from a caterpillar to a butterfly from the weak symbolism of your guilty conscious.”

“Oh? Then what is gender smartypants!”

“I was hoping you would tell me. All I have are YouTube videos about semen retention and how men assert dominance when women play games. I don’t even know how to masturbate yet.”

“You learned all of this from YouTube?”

“Chat. YouTube. Reddit. I make the conscious choice to take the red pill of reality. I have a PHD in the world you fail to see, Kit-Cat. Maybe you should read to yourself more instead of acting like you know what we need to hear?”

“Well, edumacate yourself about this, young boy!” Evelyn began to shake her finger at the kid, but then paused when she felt her heart drop with embarrassment as the eyes of adults around the library began to take notice.

“Ryan, let’s go!” says Ryan’s mom, stuffing 4 candles into her purse and waving him to follow.

“See ya later, geek-wad,” Ryan says as he bolts out of the sunflower bean bag and is out the door before Evelyn realizes how long the other kids have been staring at her, watching a fight ensue between her and a frontal lobeless child who is less than half her age.

“Maybe I do need to read more…” Evelyn said… “Reading time is over, kids, let's take a break.”

The children celebrate with glee and freedom that only further sank Evelyn into a spiral of “What the hell am I doing with my life?”

“You know if you read more, it’s going to help you write Eve-ey,” Charlie says, sneaking up behind Evelyn like a slick piece of douchebag.

“It’s Evelyn Charlie, you know this,” Evelyn said, staring at Charlie like he was a walking piece of pork.

“Eve-ey loosen your goose. I can tell you haven’t been laid since Obama was president.”

“Not everyone sells candles to desperate housewives for a bean flick!”

“I am a consenting adult who favors nothing more than the company of a mature woman.” Charlie grinned like his secret charm was bigger than the galaxy.

“You’re a sleezy burnout who preys on people who have lower self-esteem than you, so you can always be in control!”

“Okay, pump the brakes, bro-migo, why are you so not zen today? I saw you yelling at that hot mom’s kid. We don’t yell at kids. It's probably the only thing we aren’t allowed to do…”

“I wasn’t yelling…he started…. Look…”

“I think you need a journey in the sensory delight of passion peach pits. The rad taste of peach and organic body odor is 1 candle light away, from you… My dude…”

“You’re an idiotic wet cigarette. But this comforts my intelligence.”

“You don’t always have to bring people down to lift yourself up, Eve-ey-dweeb.”

“You don’t have to act like you have rhythm. I know you fuck like rock salt. Fast dissolving and hard until wet.”

“Gross, Evey-Steve. You want to get a drink and light a candle later?”

“I don’t hate myself that much today, let me take a rain check for when I want to set myself on fire.”

“Oh, offer resended permanently.”

“Yeah, we’ll see about that wood-wick-dick. HA! Now who’s rhyming?”

“Righteous. We’re kinda flirting.”

“Oh fuck off!”

“With plea…”

“Get out of here! I’m going to go read!”

“Isn’t that like your job, Eve-ey?”

“Yes! Leave me alone and let me do my job!”

Charlie put both hands up like he was being held at gunpoint by the police and slowly backed away. Evelyn raised her eyebrows like a sniper laser was pointed at Charlie until he was out of her sight.

Evelyn sat in front of a computer and started writing,

Title:

The Burnout, The Librarian, The Rugrat, and the Milf…..