The Internship

Bonita walked out of her literary theory class by herself, clutching her books to her chest. She hadn’t made any real friends in her first two years at Brown and was starting to doubt her decision to major in English.

It seemed like the engineers were always huddled together, colluding.

She would like to collude, even just once in a while. Maybe it wasn’t too late to switch majors.

Someone smacked into Bonita, jarring her out of her reverie. She smiled.

“Hello, Prof. Shumblybraun.”

He had looked ready to continue barreling down the hallway, on a mission, but her greeting made him pause. He adjusted his glasses. “Hey, you took my class once, didn’t you?”

“The nineteenth-century women writers survey. It was incredible. It’s why I’m an English major.”

Nineteenth-century women writers had been wildly interesting, but Bonita’s favorite thing about the class had been Prof. Shumblybraun himself.

The veneer of the absentminded professor was an obvious front. The way he stood before the class in his corduroy jackets with the leather elbow patches, his personhood and humanity leaked out through the seams.

Bonita could practically smell the sadness and sense of abandonment on him. If there was no character like him in any nineteenth-century novel, someone should write that book now.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I probably led you astray from a perfectly respectable premed major or something.”

“Well, premed’s not a major. You have to major in something and also be on the premed track.”

Bonita scrambled to find something interesting to talk about to extend the conversation. It was the first time she’d felt human in Sayles Hall that semester, and she wasn’t letting it go so easily.

“Hey, aren’t you on sabbatical? I was disappointed you weren’t teaching this semester.”

He became noticeably looser and stopped gazing around the hall to focus on her.

“As a matter of fact, I’ve made a rather interesting discovery, and it’s going to be my research focus during my sabbatical.” His face lit up. “What did you write about for your final paper in my class?”

“Irish power dynamics in the novels of Maria Edgeworth.”

He clapped his hands together as if he were catching a thought. “That was a very memorable paper. So you like unusual reading?”

Bonita shrugged. “Sure. Doesn’t everyone?”

“No, they don’t.” He put his hand on her shoulder. It burned with his feverish excitement. “How would you like to be my sabbatical assistant?”

“So, like an internship?” said Bonita. She was looking to fill out her résumé. And work on something intensely with a select group of people. Maybe this was her chance to collude with others She’d show those self-important engineers.

“Whatever you’d like to call it. Come with me.”

This was taking a fascinating turn. She followed him upstairs to his office. He pulled a stack of papers out from among identical-looking stacks on the desk and each sat in an appropriate chair.

“Write your information here, like your student number, so I can get the paperwork in order,” said Prof. Shumblybraun. “Do you have a cell phone that can take good pictures?”

“Sure.” Bonita wrote her full name and phone number as well as her student ID along with the helpful phrase “sabbatical assistant,” as she was convinced he didn’t remember her name. “What exactly would I be assisting you with?”

He leaned back in his chair. “It’s not easy to describe. You have to see it to understand it.”

He tore a square off a bigger sheet and scrawled an address on Atwells Avenue. “Come here at 9 a.m. on Monday. The scanner’s being delivered tomorrow, so everything should be ready for you by then.”

“Just a hint?” asked Bonita.

“Very strange books,” said Prof. Shumblybraun with a grin.

“Stranger than Edgeworth?”

“Much, much stranger.”

* * *

On Monday, Bonita thought Prof. Shumblybraun must’ve written down the wrong address, or even that he’d duped her for unknown reasons, because there was no house at that number. Only a vacant lot. It stood out on Atwells Ave, which was full of restaurants and residences, shops and convenience stores. No lot there could remain vacant for long.

Frustrated, she paced up and down the street. She looked at the address and at her phone, wondering if she should try to find Prof. Shumblybraun’s number or just trudge back up College Hill and forget all about the internship, about English, about trying to fit in at Brown at all.

But when she looked at the vacant lot again, it wasn’t vacant anymore.

It was an old house, single-family, painted white. There was nothing special about it, except that the red door opened just enough for Prof. Shumblybraun to beckon her.

“Come in! Don’t be afraid!”

Bonita wondered what she was getting into even before she stepped inside to see that the house was obviously abandoned, with peeling wallpaper, dust all over the antique light fixtures, and a broken window or two.

Prof. Shumblybraun, on the other hand, had shed every indication of melancholy and loneliness. He led Bonita away from a staircase of questionable weight tolerance, chattering like a wind-up toy. Bonita felt compelled to follow.

Near the fireplace, close to a door that was open enough to show that it led into the basement, a stack of papers glowed green.

“Are these the strange books you mentioned?”

“That’s the smallest part of them! Come, I’ll show you your desk.”

Bonita realized the papers weren’t glowing. The green light emanated from the basement. While Prof. Shumblybraun waited for her at the top of the basement stairs, he looked like he was made of green Jell-O.

He held up his hand and studied the hunter shadows and neon highlights. “Don’t worry about this. The scientists say it’s harmless. We haven’t had any mishaps in the month we’ve been setting up.”

He jogged down the stairs. Bonita followed on tiptoe, observing how the natural tan of her shoes became greener and greener with every step.

She wasn’t sure anyone should approach whatever the source of that eerie light was. Anything that emitted that kind of green light couldn’t be as harmless as Prof. Shumblybraun seemed to believe.

How far was she willing to go for the professor who’d inspired her? Could she subsume all her colors into shades of green for the sake of fitting in somewhere?

All thought flew out of her head when she reached the bottom of the stairs.

Prof. Shumblybraun stood shoulder-deep in stacks of what appeared to be documents. But they weren’t documents like you might find in an archive—no newspapers, pamphlets, or books sewn together by loving wives and mothers. These documents came in all known shapes and some unknown. Most were bound together like books.

“This is your desk,” he said.

Bonita wove her way through a path that felt like a tunnel with walls made of books, and found that Prof. Shumblybraun was next to a large banker’s desk with an even larger and more antique piece of machinery suspended over a white mat.

“The John Carter Brown Library has generously donated this dinosaur so we can photograph, catalogue, and classify all this wonderful work. And that will be our job,” he said.

Bonita picked up the nearest tome, a striped rhomboid, and opened to a random page. The squiggles and slashes were beautiful but meaningless to her.

“How can I classify these books? I can’t read them. Are there any in the Roman alphabet?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll train you in the rather magical translation process this house has.”

“Magical,” Bonita breathed. Her eyes couldn’t take in all the books, and the green light had a slight warping effect that she thought was making her dizzy. “But where is that green light coming from?”

“Hello,” said a new voice, and Bonita turned to see two women near the back wall. They seemed to be a professor and a graduate assistant.

“We’re from the physics department,” said the graduate student. “This is where the green light comes from.”

She was referring to a glowing green orb between her and the physics professor that seemed to be regular in shape, but also undefinable; as large as an average human, but also about the size of a breadbox. Bonita couldn’t stop staring at it. It seemed to take away her capacity for speech and thought.

“That’s where I think the books are coming from,” said Prof. Shumblybraun, releasing Bonita from the orb’s thrall. “Beyond that, we don’t really know what it is.”

“I have a few theories,” said the graduate student. She had a stunning smile, even with green teeth.

“What did you say your name was?” asked the physics professor. Everyone seemed aware that Bonita hadn’t said her name. Bonita suspected the professor was trying to help Prof. Shumblybraun.

“Bonita. Nice to meet you.”

“Bonita,” said Prof. Shumblybraun as if he’d known all along. “Welcome to the Atwells Avenue Anomaly task force.”

Spend more time in the basement on Atwells Ave—and far, far beyond—in The Atwells Avenue Anomaly: A Novella.