fiction by sara rani reddy

Windows to the Soul

She could just make out the lines in her copy of Madame Bovary under the dim lights, which cast a flickering glow over the room, the faint green of the surviving fluorescent bulbs mixing with the red of the exit sign to create a golden ambiance. From her seat in the back of the classroom, Maya stared over the heads of the fifteen other girls to gaze at him as he pressed the white chalk into the blackboard, dissecting the scene between Emma and Rodolphe. 

Absentmindedly, she mimicked his movements, her fingers tracing over the rough surface of her paperback, falling off the edge of the page onto the soft, dimpled surface of her notebook. As he spoke, not once did her eyes flit up to the clock above his head or to the one behind her own. If they had, she would have seen that even these two clocks seemed to be transfixed by him as they both ticked on, five minutes and seven minutes slow.

Having mapped out Emma’s affairs, he turned around to face the class. As he lectured, he strode in precise, graceful movements back and forth from the edge of the blackboard to the side of the classroom, his faint shadow following him almost as closely as Maya’s eyes did. He walked to the wall of windows—windows that shed no light and provided no reprieve for those students who wished to emulate the romantic characters of the books on their syllabus, staring off into the green hills of the English countryside that surrounded St. Angela’s Academy for Girls. 

By now, the students were used to it. But three weeks earlier, when they had stepped off the buses at the start of the new term, with their suitcases filled with wrinkled uniforms for lessons and pristine dresses to wear out on weekends, it had been a distressing sight to behold. Every north-facing window of their beloved establishment, with its four separate wings unfurling on either side of the entrance hall, had been boarded up. The next day during the assembly, the headmistress had gone on to explain the presence of what is sure to be a temporary measure, I assure you, in order to preserve the building as renovations and structural reinforcements are carried out. 

But as Maya had stood in the crowd, luggage in hand, next to her friends in the St. Angela Literary Society, she had felt a great unrest settle in her chest. There was something violent about the cheap plywood, nailed to the centuries-old, ornate windows of the school that she had come to love over the past three years. Initially excited for the start of her final year, she had anxiously craned her neck from side to side to keep the ailing building in sight amid the crowd of students, waiting as the last of the buses arrived from the train stations and airport.

A few of the first-years had huddled together in the front, frantically whispering that the boarded-up windows meant that school had closed, until a great, shuddering groan quieted the throng. All heads snapped to the front to see the grand oak doors of the entrance hall swing open, as the headmistress and the faculty paraded out onto the gravel walkway, lining either side of the path. The weight in Maya’s chest had lifted a little at this familiar tradition. The gravel crunched underfoot as the girls around her gathered their belongings, preparing for the procession into the school, guided by their teachers. 

The guided way was longer than before. This year, St. Angela’s boasted its largest crop of esteemed instructors yet, having snatched up the brightest graduates from the top universities in the country to educate their precious girls. These newest members had brought up the rear of the line, standing just inside the doorway, shrouded in the darkness of the usually luminous entrance hall. As the crowd began to move through the tunnel of teachers, Maya and her friends had exchanged a mix of apprehensive and delighted glances, taking the last first steps of their secondary school lives. 

Soon, the slow rambling accelerated into a march, and her eyes swiveled back and forth as she smiled at the teachers she knew and nodded to the faculty members she didn’t. Midway, she found and waved to Mrs. Dubuc who, after being promoted to move up each year, had taught all of Maya’s literature courses thus far. Taking the bus from her parents’ modest home an hour away, she had gone to the school every week over the summer to work with Mrs. Dubuc, preparing her applications to study literature at university. Having scored well on her A-levels the previous year, she had allowed a cautious spark of confidence to grow, believing that next year, she would be at university, taking the first steps in her journey to becoming a teacher. In the last week before the start of term, she had relaxed at home for the first time all summer, blissfully unaware of the changes underway at the school. As Mrs. Dubuc waved back, Maya mustered a brave face and smiled at her favorite teacher who had been reassigned to teach the first-years. Glancing at the young girls walking briskly around her, Maya knew that they would never find a better guide to the incredible worlds concealed between book covers. 

Finally stepping into the entrance hall, the students plunged into darkness. The filigreed sconces on the perimeter of the circular room were just for show and weren’t bright enough to light up a broom closet. Maya had felt her eyes widen, trying to let as much light as possible pass into her pupils. The crowd had slowed as the other students struggled to adjust to the dark. After a few seconds, the hall came into view, and she saw the new class of teachers. As opposed to the esteemed faculty standing outside, with arms at their sides or held decorously behind their backs, tradition dictated that these new instructors cradle in their arms the heavy metal nameplates that would soon be fixed to their office doors. Their polished surfaces reflected the sconces’ dim glow, obscuring the names and titles engraved in the metal. As Maya shuffled past them, she caught sight of one plate that read “Department of Literature” and brought her eyes up to look at the man who had taken her favorite teacher’s job. She had quickly shifted her gaze to the other side of the line, taking in the new chemistry and biology instructors. In her mind, no one could replace Mrs. Dubuc. 

But as she sat in the dark classroom, listening to him expound on the motif of decay in Madame Bovary, his Italian Oxfords clicking on the worn wooden floors, she let her mind wander for a moment and wondered what made him so fascinating—the way he spoke, the way he paused, the way he resumed his train of thought. She closed her eyes, and immediately she pictured the same voice coming from a wizened, respected, scatter-brained Head of Department. He always followed his contemplative pauses with an accelerando, rushing through the rest of the sentence as if, after having taken a moment to think, he had grown impatient to get onto the next idea. Stifling a smile, she opened her eyes to look at the man at the front of the classroom. Give him some gray sideburns, perch a pair of spectacles on the edge of his nose, and that’s who will be teaching in this classroom in fifty years. That is, if the building is still standing. 

Satisfied that the students had exhausted all discussion of Emma’s tragic, gruesome end, he clapped his hands, bringing Maya back to attention. 

“Right.” He rubbed his hands together. “Let’s zoom out, shall we? We have this novel, Madame Bovary. You astute young ladies have given me some wonderful comments on Emma’s character and how she changes over time. Now, answer me this.” 

He paused, his gleaming eyes raking over the rows of students. 

“Would you say that Emma is the title character of the novel?”

An initial silence covered the room, the students freezing in their seats by instinct, knowing that the slightest movement—a flick of the head to remove a hair bothering one’s eye, a twitch of the hand to catch a pencil rolling off the desk—would thrust them into the open. They waited, biding their time. And he waited, too, no longer pacing, but swaying gently from side to side. Maya counted in her head to ten, at which point, he furrowed his thick eyebrows together to playfully glare at the students. 

“Come now, I can see the gears turning in your heads, ladies.” 

The students felt the tension lift, and began to shift in their seats, no longer rooted to the spot. Maya watched in rapture, taking mental notes, filing these little tricks away for her future classroom. She counted another five seconds before he switched to a different tactic. 

“I’ll put it another way. Why is the novel called Madame Bovary and not the character’s given name? Why not Emma?” His voice inflected ever so slightly at the end, as if to gently lay the question at their feet, trying to coax an answer out of them. “Pourquoi pas Emma?” He grinned, sliding his hands into his pockets as he shrugged, letting the lilt of a French accent seep into his voice.

“Because,” called out Janine, from the desk just in front of Maya, “Jane Austen had already called dibs on that title?” She pushed back in her chair and balanced on its back legs, basking in the appreciative chuckles from her classmates, all members of the Literary Society. She turned her head to wink at Maya, who smirked and shook her head, flipping to the front cover of her notebook to add a tally to the log—Janine was pulling ahead in the Society’s game of Literary Laughs. 

As president of the society, Maya was charged with keeping track of the scores. Though she would never admit this to her compatriots, she found the game to be a bit contrived. Only those who harbored a knowledge of nineteenth-century European literature would have been able to understand, let alone enjoy, most of the puns and quips that these tally marks represented. She believed that a love of literature did not have to belong exclusively to those who specialized in the subject—a good teacher could awaken an appreciation for artful stories in anyone. That’s what Mrs. Dubuc had done. And it seemed as though that’s what he was doing. So far. 

He waited for the chuckles to subside before speaking again. For a second, Maya thought she caught a glimpse of a wrathful look on his face, his eyes hard, his jaw clenched, before it dissolved, returning to his patient gaze. 

“Thank you, Miss Cooper,” he said flatly as he stalked back to the blackboard, “for keeping all four legs of your chair on the floor.” 

With his back to them, the girls took the moment of privacy to turn to each other and silently react to this professorial pique, a confusing happenstance in the face of a perfectly pertinent joke. Janine set her chair down with refined obedience but rotated to look at Maya with raised eyebrows. Maya shrugged, trying to keep her face calm and collected as she felt the weight settle in her chest again. 

He turned back, and at once, the girls straightened in their seats. On the timeline, he had circled the moment Emma became Madame Bovary and underlined the rest of the events, representing the last two-thirds of the book.

Maya’s eyes widened as the ideas took shape in her head. She grew more and more conscious of her own heartbeat. At first it was a faint patter, like the raindrops she could hear from her favorite spot in the library during a storm. By the time his eyes reached the back row, her heart had become a gong, ringing over and over until she was sure that the others could feel it through the floor. Thump, thump, thump. 

She knew what it meant. She usually ignored it, especially with teachers who seemed on edge. But as she looked at him, something moved her to stop resisting. The embarrassment of getting an answer wrong would not burn as hot as the anguish of knowing the right answer and staying quiet, at least in this class.

Thump, thump, thump. 

“Yes, Miss Lehrer?”

“Well, sir.” Maya tried to repress her involuntary vibrato. “Apart from the consideration of copycat titles, as Janine pointed out”—she saw Janine turn around and flash her a smile, which calmed her nerves and steadied her voice—“I think Flaubert might have been pointing out how Emma and Madame Bovary aren’t really the same person.” She paused, taking a deep breath that she hoped sounded less like a gasp from the front of the room. 

Thump, thump, thump. 

Her eyes darted around to see half of the students looking back at her, their arms hooked over the backs of the wooden chairs, as the other half kept their attention on him. His face betrayed neither agreement nor disagreement. So she continued.

“I think that we see how much Emma has idealized marriage, and when she becomes Madame Bovary, those ideals and the reality of the situation. . . they kind of diverge.” More of the students turned to face her, and she looked at them, her eyes roaming from side to side as she spoke. 

“We have the Emma who is trapped in the confines of her marriage as Madame Bovary, and then we have the Emma who has affairs with men, who has somewhat unrealistic expectations for these short-lived breaks from her married life, and who eventually would rather die than face the consequences of what she has done to Madame Bovary’s name and financial status.” 

Thump, thump, thump. She waited in silence, unsure of how to signal that she was done. She looked from her classmates up to him and started slightly. His eyes were staring piercingly at her.  

After a moment, he began to nod, unblinking. “Very nice, Miss Lehrer. Good explanation.” 

She felt herself blush. She had done it, and he had said it was right. She looked down at her copy of the book, the spine so broken that the pages laid flat, waiting for her command. She closed it and shifted the notebook to rest on top, making a note of her triumph in the margin as another student carried on the discussion with an idea sparked by what she had said. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Janine turn ever so slightly. Maya glanced up for a surreptitious celebration of the moment with her friend. 

But her eyes looked past Janine when she realized that he hadn’t shifted his gaze to Gwen, who was trying to muddle through a point that she had forgotten the moment he had called on her. Maya locked eyes with him. Even after Janine had turned back around and Gwen had trailed off into silence, even after he called on the next student with a simple “Yes,” he was still looking at Maya. 

She felt her chest tighten. Thump, thump, thump. Maybe he was looking at the clock behind her. She made a quick mental calculation that class must be over soon. She blinked. He didn’t. But why wouldn’t he just look at his watch? She shifted her gaze to the wrist of his chalk-dust-covered hand and quickly looked back up at him. Thump, thump, thump. His eyes hadn’t moved. The weight was growing heavier, and the gong was ringing louder than ever, when suddenly the whole class flinched. 

At the sound of the bell, the spell was broken. He looked down at his wrist and then above Maya’s head. 

“I put in a maintenance request for them to fix the clock more than two weeks ago,” he grumbled, as the students gathered their books to leave for lunch. “Okay, we’ll pick this discussion up next class.”

“Sir, the clock above the blackboard is wrong, too,” said Gwen, packing away her highlighters and mechanical pencil.

“Oh.” He twisted around to look at the analog clock and nodded. “Thank you, Miss Thomas, I’ll tell them to fix that one, too. See you all anon.” He bent down to retrieve his leather satchel, pulling out a folio to scribble a note about maintenance. The students gradually shuffled out into the hallway, sneakers squeaking against the wood floor. 

“Hey,” a voice whispered. 

Maya looked up to see Janine standing over her, staring pointedly at all of Maya’s things still on the desk. 

“Oh, yeah.” She broke out of her reverie with a shake of her head and began packing up. 

Janine smiled. “Time for French!”

The two girls walked to the door, grilling each other on the subjunctive conjugation of the verb être ahead of the quiz they would face in a matter of minutes.

“Bonne chance, mes étudiantes!” They both turned back to see him smiling graciously as he looked down, paging slowly through his folio, glancing up after a moment. Janine rolled her eyes ever so slightly.

“Merci, professeur,” Maya replied. “Nous vous souhaitons une bonne journée! À demain!” 

For a millisecond, he gave her a blank stare before nodding and turning his attention back to his folio. The girls exchanged a look and merged into the congested highway of the hallway. 

“Didn’t he study in Paris for, like, two years during his PhD?” Janine asked. 

“That’s what I heard,” Maya said. 

They shrugged and resumed their verb conjugations.

*

Two months later, on the Friday before the term break, the girls of the St. Angela Literary Society congregated in the library during the lunch break, whispering excitedly about their plans for the winter holiday and wondering about everyone’s score on the slew of tests and essays they were getting back that day. Their eyes strained to see each other as they nestled in the comfortable chairs by the bay windows, still covered with plywood. The only saving grace of the wood was that it kept out the cold of the winter air.

“Maya!” Janine whispered. “What did you put for number seven on the chemistry test? I put hydrogen, but Mr. Dupuis marked it wrong!” 

“Uh. . .” Maya closed her eyes, casting her mind back to conjure up the image of the test paper buried in the depths of her rucksack. “I wrote H2. I think he wanted us to give him the naturally occurring molecule, not just the element. Sorry, J.” She frowned as she stood, hoisting her bag onto her back.

“Where are you going?” Gwen cried at the sound of her leaving. “I thought we were going to plan out our costumes for the Christmas party I’m throwing.”

“Maya’s off to see his royal highness,” Janine said, earning a reproachful hiss from the librarian who swung a yellow beam from a flashlight in her direction. “She needs him to write a letter for one of her program applications.” 

Janine waited for the librarian to move the flashlight before pulling a face at the thought of their lit teacher. Over the course of the term, he had demonstrated a particular distaste for Janine’s sense of humor, and it had taken its toll. She was now second to last in the Literary Laughs competition. She was taking it very personally.

“What, Mrs. Dubuc’s not writing the letter for you?” Gwen asked Maya, who shifted uncomfortably under the weight of her bag.

“No, my first-choice program wants me to get a letter from one of their alums. Luckily, our prof’s one of their most esteemed students,” Maya explained, instinctively turning to give the stern librarian a smile as the old woman shuffled past with a squeaky cart in the dark. “They think it’s important to network, so they don’t accept any applications if you don’t have that letter.” 

“Well, that’s uptight,” Gwen said. “Anyway, just tell me now who you’ll be going as, and I’ll note it down. That way we don’t all wear the same thing.” 

“I don’t know, Gwen!” Exasperated, Maya tried to look in Gwen’s general direction. “I’ve spent the last two months studying and writing essays for the end of term. I haven’t had any time to plan a costume!”

“The theme’s Winter in Literature,” Janine piped up. “She can always go as our teacher. He’s the most stone-cold fraud I’ve ever met!” The girls stifled their laughter as Maya let her bag slide off her shoulders to the floor. 

“J,” she chided. “Come on, he’s not that bad.”

“I beg to differ,” Janine insisted. “It’s scary the way he goes on like he’s the best thing to happen to the world since the codex was invented. He’s such a fake!” Maya felt her chest tighten. Thump, thump, thump. 

She had heard the whispers, too. And seen the looks. It was hard to ignore the recent trend of faculty members seeming to have an urgent appointment in another wing of the building every time they saw him walking their way. He had somehow found himself at the bottom of the first-year faculty pyramid. Even the girls of the Literary Society had started to tire of his pretentious style. Janine had proposed a new game for the Literary Laughs: every student who worked one of his annoying catchphrases into their responses in class without him noticing would get a point. Janine had convinced a little less than half the group. If she got two more girls, they’d have a majority vote, and Maya would have to paste another table into her notebook to keep scores. 

“Janine.” Maya breathed deeply, trying to push her nerves away. Thump, thump, thump. “I just need him to write me a good letter, that’s all.”

“Sorry, M.” Janine sounded repentant. “I know that program’s important to you. He’ll write you a killer letter. He loves you.” There was not one ounce of bitterness in her voice. Maya knew that Janine’s sincerity should have brought a smile to her face, but she was grateful to darkness for shrouding her uncertainty. 

“What’s wrong?” Janine asked, reading Maya’s silence. 

“He is going to write a good letter, right? We’ve only had him for one term.” Thump, thump, thump.

“Of course he is!” her friends chittered. 

“Whenever he calls on you,” Gwen said, “you always have the most insightful things to say in class!”

“And,” Janine jumped in, “he’s given you top marks on all your papers. He knows you’ve got a mind for literature.”

“Thanks.” Maya let a hesitant smile grow on her face. A second later, the doubt crept back in.

“But I can’t really tell what he thinks of my papers. He hasn’t written much on them. Just ‘Nice’ or ‘Good job’ and then my score.”

“You’re right. He hasn’t really given any feedback on mine either,” Gwen complained. “I spent a lot of time on my essays. I wanted to be more appreciated. I was hoping he was going to write more on our final papers, but he hasn’t even given them back yet.”

“Yeah, what’s up with that? Is he allowed to keep them over the break? Doesn’t the office need our grades for our transcripts?” Janine asked. 

The group jumped as the school bell rang, noting the end of the period and the start of office hours.

“Well, I will bring it up with him when I see him,” Maya called out as she slung her bag over her shoulder. She rushed out of the library before the librarian’s flashlight could find her. 

*

Maya hadn’t been in the teachers’ wing of the academy since the previous year. All her other teachers had held their office hours in the library with an industrial lantern lighting up the space. Without the hustle and bustle of students, she found this wing eerily quiet. 

The long corridors were usually illuminated by fanlight windows, but these too had been boarded up, casting a blanket of darkness over the space, despite the meager fluorescent lights that buzzed softly overhead. She clicked on the pocket flashlight clipped to her bag and made her way to the Literature cluster of offices. Maya found his nameplate fixed to the second to last door of the hallway. She extinguished her light as she turned to face the frosted glass of the door. The cold white glow of artificial light shined around the nameplate glued to the center of the pane. She could see a blurry shadow moving around inside. Thump, thump, thump. 

Her knock at the door was met with his disembodied voice declaring, “You may enter.” Maya grasped the cold brass doorknob, which squeaked as she turned it. The office wasn’t much brighter than the hallway. A large circular window loomed on the back wall, slivers of yellow sunshine visible from the edges of the plywood that rested against the glass. The circle framed him in its center. He glanced up, somewhat surprised to see Maya. She felt her face mirror his, as she stood frozen in the doorway.

“Come in, Maya,” he said, beckoning her into the office. It was quite large—at least the size of two broom closets. “Close the door.” 

She obeyed, stepping over the threshold and swinging the door closed behind her before taking the seat beside his desk. The same ornate sconces from the entrance hall glowed on the walls, but most of the light in the room came from a tarnished lamp stationed in the corner of his wide oak desk. The bronze figure of a woman resting against a large tree held up a lampshade made of iridescent mother-of-pearl, dispersing the light in a warm glow around the room. It shined off of the scratched surface of the desk, reflecting against his face, casting an undefined shadow on the plywood-covered window behind him. 

At the beginning of the term, back when he was the talk of the school, Maya had heard that the lamp had been a prize, bestowed upon him during his time at university. Janine had heard the headmistress whispering to a French teacher that the lamp used to belong to Fitzgerald, having been passed down from colleague to colleague, as a badge of honor. Mrs. Dubuc had heard from another literature faculty member that it was actually Hemingway’s. Gwen had heard from the chemistry teacher that it was originally James Patterson’s. 

“How can I help you?” He smiled, propping his elbows up on the desk, leaning forward. 

Maya took a deep breath, putting her hand on the edge of the desk. “I just wanted to check in with you ab—” 

THUNK, THUNK, THUNK, THUNK. They both jumped at the noise. His face broke into a boyish laugh, and he extended his arm across the desk, reaching around a mug of black and red pens to grasp her hand. 

“There is nothing to fear, Maya.” He smiled, patting her knuckles. “That’s just the construction workers outside. In fact, it’s good news. They’re finishing up the renovations in this wing, so today my office will finally be liberated from this infernal darkness! Finally! It only took them the entire term to get it done.” The construction noise settled to a dull sound, the plywood outside the window shifting ever so slightly with each beat.

Maya pursed her lips, turning them upwards into a smile, keeping her eyes down. She pulled her hand away from the desk and from him. Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk. She cleared her throat. 

“I suppose it’ll be nice to finally have some natural light, sir.” Taking a deep breath, she got straight to the point. “So, I’m here about the letter of recommendation for my application?” 

“Right, you are applying to my alma mater.” He nodded, swinging his hand around to open a filing cabinet behind him. He rummaged around and pulled out a yellow folder. He turned back to her, laying the file on the desk, slowly looking over the information. 

“I just wanted to check in with you,” Maya said, unsure if it was her job to fill the silence, “since the deadline is coming up in two weeks.” Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk. 

“I’m still working on it,” he said, after a few moments. “I’m still grading final essays and I wanted to incorporate my observations on your paper into my letter.” He sighed. “I meant to have the papers done by now, but I was called away for a literary summit in London.” His eyebrows danced to the top of his forehead, and he threw his hands up. “It couldn’t be helped. The English countryside demands to be looked at when you travel by train. You simply can’t ignore it to stare at papers the whole time.” He chuckled, looking down at the file. 

She smiled and waited for him to continue. He glanced up at her, and the upturned angle of his distinguished eyebrows made Maya rush to agree with him.

“Oh, quite right, sir, it can’t be helped.” Sweat started to seep into the fibers of her uniform sweater. Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk.

He nodded appreciatively, cleared his throat, and looked back at the file on his desk, his eyebrows still at attention. “So, I’m almost done with your essay, but not yet, and therefore not done with the letter.”

Maya shook her head. “That’s okay, sir.” Her head kept shaking in the silence that followed as he continued looking at the file. 

“Actually, Maya, would you be a dear and get my folio with the essays? It’s in my satchel,” he asked, motioning with his chin to the leather bag crumpled on the floor in the shadows beside the desk. 

“Oh, uh, sure, sir.” Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk. Maya rose from the chair and knelt on the wood floor, reaching down to open the bag. Her eyes tried to adjust to the dark, but she eventually resigned herself to blindly feeling around for the clasp. 

At the slightest touch, the leather seemed to crumble in her hands, a stale aroma wafting towards her. Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk. She recoiled at the sensation, peeking up to see that he was still engrossed in the file on the desk. Maya braced herself and held her breath. She clicked the latch and swung open the flap to retrieve the smooth folio. She immediately straightened and returned to her chair, taking deep breaths to dispel the scent of old leather from her sinuses. Maya opened the folio, paging through to find her essay. He reached over the desk, snatching it out of her hands. Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk.

“I’ll take that, dear,” he said, a few seconds late. Maya had already seen her essay at the bottom of the pile, untouched. “You know how it gets,” he said, “you just ha—”

CRACK! The room was flooded with light as the plywood fell away from the window, crashing to the ground two stories below.

“Wow!” he exclaimed, turning around to look out of the window, her essay still in his hand. “Let there be light!” 

“Hmm.” Maya acknowledged his statement, unsure of whether she could leave now, but the light from outside was too enticing. She felt the weight in her chest start to dissipate as the sunlight and cold air streamed in through the window. 

Her enjoyment of the vista outside the window was short-lived. A red cherry picker soon glided into view, with construction workers wrapped up in balaclavas and gloves reaching up to grab any wayward nails. The sunlight reflected the paint of the metal, casting a ruddy pall over the room.

He turned back to the desk and put the essay down, grabbing a black pen from the mug. “Nice,” he murmured under his breath. His hand slipped over the surface of the page as he made small check marks every now and then. With the window obstructed, Maya tried to entertain herself by looking around the office, now that she could actually see it. 

But the light was not kind, revealing holes in the baseboards and suspicious black specks in the corners of the room. She grimaced and brought her gaze to the lamp, its bulb glowing, fighting to be seen in the red light from the window. Her eyes traveled down the base, noting the knots of the tree and the folds of the woman’s dress. She froze when she saw the ghostly white square at the very bottom, the fuzzy translucent section of a torn-off label, with a sliver of solid white remaining. In the daylight, Maya could just make out the text printed in dark ink: –odwill, $6.99. 

She couldn’t stop her sharp intake of the breath. At the noise, he looked up from the essay to see her looking at the lamp. He chuckled. 

“It’s a funny story about that lamp.” He rested his elbow on the edge of the desk, his black pen twirling in his hand. “At university, they said that it belonged t—” 

Maya tore her eyes away from the label to look at him. He was staring at the remnants of the sticker. He glanced at her before swiping the lamp off the desk, into his lap. “I don’t really need this anymore, do I? I think there’s more than enough light in the room now.” 

She heard his breath quicken as he brought his eyes back down to stare intently at her essay. With his left hand cradling the still-glowing lamp, his right hand dropped the black pen, slowly reaching back towards the mug. She was transfixed as he picked up a red pen and drew a line through her first paragraph. She couldn’t see the ink in the red light of the office, just the impression of the ballpoint pen, the deep gash on the smooth paper. Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk.

She opened her mouth to speak. Before she could get a word out, he snapped, “That’ll be all, Miss Lehrer. You will get your final paper back at the start of the next term, and I will let you know when I have submitted my letter to the program.” He slowly brought his head up to look at her. 

Somewhere deep in her chest, she felt a flutter, an impulse to stay. 

But she was afraid in this room. If she didn’t leave now, she had the strangest feeling that another chance to escape would never come. Maya rose, grabbing her bag with one arm and reaching back with the other. She swung the door open, turning on the spot over the threshold to close it. In her haste, she accidentally slammed it shut. 

In the hallway, she waited, holding her hands out, scared the frosted pane would fall out of the doorframe. The red light shined through the glass around the metal nameplate, bouncing off the walls in the hallway, illuminating the etched letters of Z. U. Frieden, PhD, Department of Literature. Maya stood still, confused, staring at but not seeing the letters of the name. 

She felt the flutter in her chest again, and her gaze shifted ever so slightly to the smooth surface around the engraving. She saw her eyes staring back at her. 

The whole hallway suddenly felt as if it was moving as the red glow sailed off to the right, leaving the golden glow of the sun to flow through unadulterated. The sounds of the construction crew resumed as they began to liberate another window. Maya looked at her eyes, shining in the bright light, and raised her hand to the wood of the door. Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk.