Herstory Lessons

The professor has lots of books in her office. A student she met with after class saw one on her desk and reported her. With the state of the world, she should have been more careful. Especially with her tenure case in progress.

It’s the young man who sometimes rocks back and forth in his chair like one of those plastic birds that dip up and down, pretending to drink water out of a glass. The one who couldn’t pronounce Charlemagne.

He’s the type of student who, when she first started teaching, she’d want to help find a way to flourish. Instead, after reading The Dean’s officious email on her screen, she wants to lift the drawbridge, drag buckets of scalding oil to the ramparts, and rain them down upon him. Push him into the processional march of the Pharaoh’s possessions, bury him so deep in the pyramid that not even the filthiest grave robber will find him. Shove him into the maw of a waiting Iron Maiden, who will squeeze the high-minded pus out of him in solidarity. Or maybe? Bury him up to his chin in the hot sand with the rest of the conquistadors, greedy with righteousness, and listen to him scream as hungry ants firestorm through his brain.

*

The professor’s husband is also a professor, at the same institute. He’s older, in an adjacent academic field; but no, she was never his student. She was a speaker at a conference, and he sought her out after her talk, to talk — the start of something she became inclined to accept.

Five years later, they have one of those oh-so-contemporary relationships where they have to schedule time together, and every Thursday they meet at the same restaurant, which used to be better. The Thursday of The Dean’s email, the professor decides to get her husband’s take on the matter.

Before she can initiate that dialogue, he reports that his ex has sold their old house. And so that’s it then, he says. Although it was over when she had the painting done for the staging, when the kids’ height records on the kitchen doorway got covered up. Extinguished!

The professor’s husband has three adult children, whose varied but similarly deep-rooted grudges against their father thankfully keep them away. He’s snuffling for nostalgia, rooting for unearned memories. Maybe history is written by the winners, maybe not. The losers have to sit listening to this pap while trying to remember the daily specials.

In the midst of their shared appetizer of heirloom this and free-range that, she broaches the subject of the overly-sensitive student and the book that sparked the situation.

The professor’s husband has mastered the scoff. That ode to the mechanics of copulation? he says. It’s a passé artifact at best.

It’s primary source, she contends, core research for her case on colonial and anti-colonial modernist interpretations of that and other related texts.

If you say so. Next time, the professor’s husband suggests, advise him to grow a pair. Therein reveals the value of the thing. To his thing. Where’s our server? I need a refill here.

*

The professor rarely takes advice anyway. That is to say, she considers the source, primary or otherwise, and on occasion grudgingly adapts any worthy bits to her needs.

The week passes, and the class meets for its next session. This being spring semester, a cohort of the students is AWOL. Unfortunately, Rocking Boy is not among them. She avoids making meaningful eye contact with him for ninety minutes.

Discussion stalls, as it’s clear few have done the assigned reading. While it’s an inoffensive set of texts regarding spiritualism in the age of the zeppelin, she’s convinced that other students around the seminar table are building grudges from it. The pack sees her tooth-marked corpus, the evidential gnawing of Rocking Boy, as an invitation to snap-jaw into the feed.

After class, the professor ascends the creaking stairs in the building. She arrives at her office to find the door open, and worried that artifacts have been filched and/or computer files pilfered, instead discovers an unwelcome gray eminence in the guest chair across from her desk.

How was class? asks The Dean.

She and he have a history. No, not that kind. Yes, a continual clashing in faculty meetings before he was hoisted up the ladder via his academically flatulent petards.

Your better half says you’re upset with me. Something about a letter?

The Dean and the professor’s husband are an annoying amalgam of scoff and smug. The husband who has intervened. The Dean who now patronizes.

You must know it was pro forma, de rigueur, status quo.

But now part of my file, the professor says.

But this visit here now, assuring you not to worry, more important.

The professor glances at the open door. So you have a key to my office?

Your better half is right, you worry too much, my dear.

After he leaves, the professor rocks back and forth in her chair. The Dean can claim to be on her side and it won’t matter. Her tenure case can get extinguished in the gauntlet of committees it’s required to go through before it reaches him, so he can claim to be blameless.

She gets up to close the door. On the way, she picks up a so-called permanent felt-tip pen off her desk.

The hallway is empty. The doors to her colleagues’ offices are closed.

She stands with her back against the frame, reaches up, and makes a mark at the top of her head, give or take a few hairs. Before she disappears, before she is erased to such an extent that no one looking back will know she existed, she turns around and puts her initials on the chipped white paint.

Jon Fain is from Massachusetts. His work includes short stories in A Thin Slice of Anxiety and Feign, flash fictions in Shooter and Punk Noir, micro fictions in Blink-Ink and ScribesMICRO, humorous essays in Lit Mag News, and a chapbook of flash fiction, Pass the Panpharmacon! from Greying Ghost Press.