CHAPTER THREE: OFFICE HOURS
800 Words
It had been raining again, the way it always seemed to in this city after October arrived, and Sera stood outside the door marked E. VOSS — OFFICE HOURS: WED 2–4PM for a full ninety seconds before she knocked.
She had a legitimate reason to be here. That was important. She had a question — a genuine academic question — about the ethical frameworks for translating sacred texts from a culture that had no living descendants to consent to the translation. It was a real problem. She had been wrestling with it genuinely for days.
The fact that she had spent more time than was warranted choosing which cardigan to wear was entirely irrelevant.
"Come in."
His office was extraordinary. She had prepared herself for the standard faculty cave — stacked papers, dead plant, motivational poster no one had ever been motivated by — and instead found a room that looked like it had been assembled by someone who actually lived inside books. Floor-to-ceiling shelves on three walls, so full that newer volumes were stacked horizontally on top of vertical rows. A large oak desk buried in organized chaos — papers in specific stacks, nothing random about the disorder, the mess of a precise mind rather than a careless one. A single lamp on the desk, warm-toned, casting the room in something less like fluorescent utility and more like a study that had always existed somewhere old and private.
He was at the desk, reading. He looked up when she entered, and for just a moment — just a blink — something moved across his face that wasn't professional neutrality.
"Miss Calloway." He set down the paper. "Sit."
She sat in the wooden chair across the desk, set her bag on the floor, and took out her notes. Professional. Focused. Not at all aware that his desk was small enough that they were perhaps four feet apart and that in here, without twelve other students in the room, the quality of silence between them was entirely different.
"Translational ethics," she said. "Specifically — the Vaelthari texts. We have no living cultural heirs. The closest descendants are a diaspora community who've lost the language entirely. So when I translate, am I doing scholarship or am I doing something closer to appropriation? Is there an ethical distinction when the source culture is genuinely extinct?"
He was quiet for a moment, looking at her. Not at her notes. At her.
"What does your instinct tell you?"
"That the question matters more than the answer," she said. "That if a scholar can ask should I translate this instead of just assuming the right, they're already in a more defensible position than ninety percent of the field."
"And yet you're translating it anyway."
"Yes."
"Why?"
She looked at him steadily. "Because the text is trying to say something. And I think there's someone meant to hear it."
The lamp on his desk flickered — just once, briefly — and his eyes dropped to the surface of the desk for a moment with an expression she couldn't read.
"Who?" he asked, quietly.
"I don't know yet."
The office was very quiet. Outside, rain moved against the window. The lamp steadied. He leaned back in his chair — slowly, like a man deciding to allow himself something — and for the first time since she'd known him he looked, just slightly, tired. Not weak. Not less. But human in a way she hadn't been given access to before.
"The ethical framework you're looking for is in Morenna's 1987 paper," he said. "She developed a concept she called custodial translation — the idea that a translator of extinct-culture texts takes on a form of guardianship rather than ownership. You're not speaking for the text. You're holding it until the right moment."
"Until someone is meant to hear it," Sera said.
His eyes came back to hers. "Yes."
The silence that followed was not uncomfortable. It was the other kind — the kind that has weight and warmth, the kind that means something is being decided without words.
She packed her notes and stood. At the door, she paused.
"Professor Voss." She wasn't sure why she turned back. Something made her. "The tattoo on your forearm. The symbols. Are they Vaelthari?"
The pause before he answered was two seconds too long.
"Good afternoon, Miss Calloway."
She left.
On the staircase, she pressed her back against the cool wall and breathed slowly. Her wrist was burning again — the marks pulsing in a steady, insistent rhythm, like a drum getting closer.
She pulled her sleeve up and looked.
The marks had rearranged again.
The central symbol — the one she'd been translating as threshold, as the moment between —
It was now unmistakably a name.
Not hers.
His.
- Writer
