SHORT STORY: Stapler

Author's Note: This is actually one I wrote for class? My professors got used to how I am as a person. So that's why it's a short one, because I wrote it for flash fiction class. Wrote in April of 2017. 

            He needed a stapler.

            The paper was due at two, the paper was four pages long, and the paper had been spit out of the printer into an unforgiving world that didn’t have any staples to hold it together. He hadn’t gone to the library to print his paper, and that was a mistake, because the library had a tableful of staplers, a loaded table with office supplies that also hole-punched and did any goddam thing you could want a stapler to do. He hadn’t gone to the library. He’d used the dorm printer, and didn’t himself own a stapler. His roommate didn’t have a stapler either. He didn’t think. He didn’t know.

            He could check if his roommate had a stapler.

            He headed back to his room. His roommate was there.

            “Do you have a stapler?” he asked, already digging through his roommate’s desk.

            His roommate groaned and muttered something incoherent, then retched. His roommate’s hangover or illness or whatever didn’t bother him. He needed to find a stapler. None on top of the desk, none in any of the three drawers.

            He’d head over to the library. Use their stapler.

            On his way out of the dorm building he had to step around a girl cornered by two much larger men. It was annoying because he really had to squeeze to get past them, the two guys were really big, and his paper was crushed and no longer pristine, now boasting the rumpled look of a paper that has been treated with no care.

            The library wasn’t far, but it was one-forty-five. He needed to hurry.

            He stepped over a young man who was bleeding and moaning on the ground and nearly tripped over a longboard. He scowled at the young man, who inquired about a cell phone to perhaps call an ambulance, in less polite terms. But he brushed the young man off, because he needed to get to the library and staple his paper and hand in his paper and then he could live again.

            The road was clear. Not that he would have cared if there was a car approaching; he would’ve gone anyway.

            A girl paced between the double sets of doors leading into the library, crying and talking on the phone. He walked past her, ignoring her “Sorry” when she nearly ran into him, and headed to the table where the staplers were stored. He stapled his paper, savoring the satisfying thud-click the stapler made when it finally, finally did what he’d needed done.

            He had to hand it in now, and he had thirteen minutes. The professor’s office wasn’t far. He walked quickly, around a young man staring blankly at a corrected test, around a girl who’d spilled her drink on herself, and took the stairs two at a time and slammed the paper down with ten minutes to spare.