Required Materials

I felt my knees begin to give out and the blood drain from my face. My mind refused to process Cynthia’s words; I shook my head, as though it would dislodge the foreign concept and shove it back into unreality. “Magdalena” and “passed away” were not words meant to be spoken with the same breath…

Chapter Two

My next class was Developmental English. This particular class was on the lower end of the skill set. It was often a mix of native or near-native English speakers who felt like abject failures, remedial leftovers, and formerly ESL (or, more accurately, I always felt, EFL, English as a Foreign Language, as it was often their third or fourth) students who…

Chapter Three

What I really needed was a drink. I needed a drink, and my work day was done—or my campus day, anyway, and any instructor who tells you they grade 100% sober 100% of the time is lying through their teeth—but I still had to get to my apartment. Even if I could afford a drink with proof high enough to make everything a little less painful, I couldn’t affo…

Chapter Four

It used to be that I had to fend off companionship. It was probably fairly high on the list of Reasons Sam Cheated on Me, if I were being honest with myself. One evening in particular, a Friday, he and some coworkers and their girlfriends and wives were meeting up at a place in the Mission that I’d been to more than once. It was mostly outside, sticky wo…

Chapter Five

The coffee kiosk was an aberration, inside the larger cafeteria and student center building but slightly removed from the rest of the food service area, just enough that it almost felt like a coffee shop and not an institutional food provider. The prices were just a little above what you’d pay for coffee from the machine inside the cafeteria proper, and…

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

May 26, 2023

The stillness in the office that had initially seemed restful now felt a touch eerie. Sasha’s theories, which I honestly hadn’t given even a moment of consideration before this, arose in my mind. If I were Charles, Maggie’s sudden death would be convenient. There was no other way to put it. It’d probably be even a little bit of a relief. The chances of …

Chapter Eight

June 3, 2023

It’s fascinating, the way rumors spread at a college. They are almost these living, breathing squirrely mammals with dusky colored fur, making their way in short bursts and skitters across campus, blending in almost exactly up against the bricks of a path, the struggling brush in a planter, the stack of old cardboard gathering dust by the water cooler i…

Chapter Nine

June 12, 2023

I didn’t pass out. That is, I don’t think I passed out, but I definitely lost time to a fugue state of sorts. I sat on the kitchen floor, listening to my breath rasp shallowly in and out of my mouth, my palms flat on the cold tile floor, the ache at my tailbone gradually receding.

Chapter Ten

July 3, 2023

I must have given him directions to my car in the end. Once we were there, I must have told him where I lived. I must have even set an alarm for myself, though I didn’t remember doing any of this, because at six-thirty the next morning, my phone alarm blasted me out of a dream.

Chapter Eleven

July 3, 2023

“Andy!” I said. “What are you doing here?” He held his serious expression for another half second as he took me in, glanced to Jess, and saw that the projector was up and running. Then his face collapsed. “Oh my god, Professor Thompson, I’m so so sorry! But I saw the lights on in here, and no one’s scheduled for this room, so I came on over to check and m…

Chapter Twelve

July 26, 2023

“So someone really is trying to mess with me,” I said, leaning my elbows on the carved up wooden table of the bar that Jess had chosen. “Like, me-me. Not someone in a random British murder-mystery limited series. Me.” “Sure seems like it,” she said, plucking the lime out of her gin and tonic and giving it another squeeze. “I really wish I had a better ex…

Chapter Thirteen

July 26, 2023

We didn’t talk much on the drive to my apartment. The rain was back, and droplets pilled across Jess’s windshield, streaking with each swipe of the windshield wipers that seemed just as frail and dried as mine. For what it’s worth, I don’t think there was ever a moment in that entire month of January that the rain really let up. Oh, the actual precipitat…

Chapter Fourteen

July 26, 2023

And then it was Monday. The day of my interview. There was, in the end, no delay. I was scheduled in perhaps the second worst slot of the morning, the final one before the break for lunch, just when the committee’s ability to focus would effectively nill. If I hadn’t known from previous rounds that the placement was mostly random, or based on distance to…