I Spent 24 Hours in the Axinn Library and Found the Mummified Corpse of Mrs. Hofstra

From our latest issue, Nonsense Loves You!

By Brenna Lilly 

10:13pm: It’s been fourteen hours already and my lips are chapped, bleeding like a tender rose.

11:44pm: I feel disgusting. I’ve been stuck in this godforsaken library since – shit, since like, 8am, and my butt-cheeks have already gone numb thrice. Do you know how embarrassing it is to have to smack your buns back to sweet consciousness in the middle of the silent zone? And the guy at the reference desk wouldn’t do it for me. This Concerta really isn’t doing shit except making me feel sweaty. All I’ve eaten so far is a carrot cake Clif bar, and I can already feel it stewing in my lower bowels. I’m full of artificial fiber and stimulants and I’ve only finished ten pages of the thirty I have for Creative Writing 135. How dare those STEM kids say they have more work than English majors.

1:16am: It’s been a long semester.

2:45am: I really should take a leak.

3:59am: I can feel my bladder pushing against my belt.

4:16am: I’m not sure how safe my laptop and books will be if I leave them in the care of this girl sitting next to me, but I ask her anyway. She seems like a Good One: I can smell it in her hair. I decide to take the stairs down from the 8th floor, because why not? Maybe the movement will get my bowels in motion.

4:23am: Stir, lads, stir!

4:37am: I can’t tell how many flights of stairs I’ve pitter-pattered down with my tiny tender feet. It feels like I’ve been spiraling into hell for hours – Dante, are you here? It’s dark – very dark, someone turned the lights off in this club. I’m trying to find the ground floor – the bathrooms down there seem the cleanest, and likely to echo the least when I drop my signature hotcakes.

5:37am: I open the door to the basement – or at least what I think is the basement. The floor is dirt, the air is thin, and ancient markings line the walls of the room. The largest engraving reads, in what I think is Cyrillic, “Sigma Delta Pi performs fellatio.” The chamber is lit only by two torches, which illuminate a large wooden door across my line of vision. This is some straight National Treasure shit. Obviously, I take my fated chance and scurry across the ground like a land rat.

6:47am: God, I lay on this floor and make sweet love to her – she is kind to me and I am her unctuous lover. My hands and knees are seeping with blood and floor-dust. I am the Son of Rat, and I crawl like my King would have asked of me.

7:14am: The door is locked, but I’m able to pick it with the shiv I made from my school ID. I knew it would come in handy one day. The cashier at ABP gave me the stink eye when I bought my grilled cheese. She didn’t know how important I am. The door opens with lubricated ease.

In front of my eyes blooms a crypt, damp and acrid, like the womb of my mother. It smells of death, and I relish it. I can feel dawn breaking, floor above me. My time here is short. The room is approximately the size of a full quad dorm in the towers, so it’s cramped. Just enough room for a coffin. It is elaborate – the mahogany squeaks as I rub my grubby fingers across the surface. Dust has grown thick and puffy, but there is an ancient blue and gold plaque which adorns the cover. I wipe it clean.

“Here lay the corpse of Ms. Kate Hofstra, First Lady of the Netherlands and Woman Wife of College Man.”

Will it open? I pry open the top, curious bladder aching. I yearn to see the truth. I gasp audibly. She is beautiful, buried with tulips and adorned with the finest garments that a burgeoning university’s president could buy. My body is prepared.

I whip out my dick, and I do it.

I do it well.

I piss.

And God, does relief finally come. I let out a guttural, orgasmic moan. I have been holding this piss for an entire day now. I look down at my watch – it’s almost 8am. But someone is rustling, rustling here in this deep hole. I don’t know how to react, so I helicopter my wang in self-defense.

“Who goes there?” I scream, dick still whipping. It is the Bright Men, in their Bright Jackets.

“You can’t be in here,” they yell at me. Words like bullets, eyes like poison. I feel their hands burn through me as they haul me out of the crypt and back into the light. They sear my skin. I am a sirloin steak and they are the Grillmasters. All I can see as I am yanked from the loins of Axinn Library is the mummified corpse of Mrs. Hofstra, staring into my peepers, smiling. She is proud of me. I am soaked in urine. I shed one tear.