Chapter Fourteen

In the chief librarian's apartment, Hazel looked out across the Welsh Hills to the south under the moonlight.

Her last few predecessors had not used this suite of rooms, designated in Zula Maud Woodhull's original design as the residence for the head of St. Fiacre's. They had been married, one with children, and chose to live in Upper Sharon or nearby Granville. During those years, the chief librarian's apartment had been used by visiting scholars. For Hazel, this perk meant a savings that was already technically part of her pay package, plus the simple lodgings suited her.

From her usual reading chair, the view to the southwest included a stretch of horizon fringed with treetops, and tonight a squashed orb sinking into view, no longer full but bright enough to keep pulling her eyes up and away from the tablet in her lap.

Setting aside the riddles of data security and password protocols, she leaned back and looked quizzically at the moon. Growing up, about Susie's age, she had gotten a small telescope for her birthday. She'd watched "2001: A Space Odyssey" or something pre-Star Wars like that, and asked to have one to scan the craters and mountains of the moon for herself. Neil Armstrong had walked on its surface a few years earlier, and Hazel began to nurture a dream of going there herself.

Those dreams had included plans to study physics and astronomy, but not one but two dreadful experiences in math classes in a row had pushed that passion aside. Science took a back seat to the humanities, and a love for literature and books bloomed in the bare spot where the earlier dream died. College and library science and experience in public and academic libraries and, in what now seemed like a mere flicker of time, she was chief librarian and director here, looking at the moon from a distance.

The fact that she wouldn't have been able to go to the moon anyhow (since humanity had stopped going for some reason altogether) didn't soften the sudden pang of recollected excitement, the hopes so long forgotten of seeing the glare of unfiltered sunlight across a grey and dusty lunar surface. It was a less exciting vision than, say, riding a sandworm across a desert planet in search of legendary spices, but it had a tang of reality that other science fiction couldn't touch.

So what do I dream of now, she asked herself? If this is, as I've said to so many, my last professional position, do I simply focus my hopes for the future on a pleasant retirement? Many of the friends she'd gained through years in library work were now retired, and they did seem to enjoy the life well enough, even those in southern, summerful lands - Florida, Arizona, Mexico. She got emails or saw Facebook posts from them, shopping and doing water aerobics and . . . shopping.

Retirement wasn't something she was afraid of so much as it wasn't what she was looking for. Leisure, relaxation, indolence (Hazel noticed the touch of judgmentalism in that thought and let it pass) were just not what she planned to anticipate.

But was there any subject or location or activity that she now aspired to? What did she want to . . . do? She really didn't know. Right now, she wanted to get herself a small telescope, and just enjoy again that long-lost dream, and the harsh beauty of the moon's landscape in the eyepiece.