Tiffany Hensley

"Go outside and stand this far away from each other." She motions with her hand the distance between her and the door. "I want you to read your essays out loud, like this. Not like this. Like this. Andy." She captures the attention of a short-haired boy sitting nearby. "This is a chance for you to be loud. Now, all of you, out!" The class files from room 107, a sense of serenity growing within the walls of an amiable atmosphere tasting lightly of pleasant bewilderment. As the foremost fling open the pair of blue hallway doors, each quiets, imbibing the muted smell of planted trees and shoveled wood chips.

A duct-tape-bound English binder is held to the author's chest. It switches to the left hand. Her light footsteps quicken to reach the old, ill-treated tree far on the opposite end of the quad. She clambers up the lower branches, her favorite pen dangling from her mouth like a bulbous black toothpick. A small coterie of spunky students pause in their loitering to observe the near-silent ascent. Settling back, propping an elbow on one knee, a sigh escapes her. Three hours of sleep threaten to lull her to sleep. Stubbornly she resists, reprimanding herself for the helf-decaf-half-regular brunch coffee.

The essay rests unoffendingly upon her lap, waiting patiently to be reread yet once more. Her voice begins reciting, pausing uncertainly at several questionable phrases. Two words quickly recieve a wet, black halo. "in that" appears on the page, scrawled tightly between single-spaced lines. The storyteller's voice resumes, slowing at the approach of the English professor below. Gray hair bobs. A dialogue box pops into the air as the students are haranged as a group for speaking too quietly. Voices spring from odd niches and perched seats, obliged to raise the volume.

Time passes.

Students stand up and walk back to the room.

The quad empties gradually.

A finger turns the page; her eye catches the movement of a figure below getting up, hands brushing the back of his jeans as he walks back towards the building. Quickly now she finishes the final page:

"The character in question bears no excuse to back the possibility of innocence. She is well aware of the many complications when she refuses to divulge the father of Pearl into the ear of the townspeople, just as she is aware of the profound and sorrowful struggle within her lover's breast in the years following. This woman knows...she knows there would be consequences, and willingly encloses the fated characters of her life within her own delicate triangle of secrecy, forcing the unknown lover and innocent husband to battle in a feud of wills that inevitably destroys both in the sad close of the plot. Since the beginning she has anticipated what her actionas would come to, that her intimate sins would not fain be suppressed in the hearts of two lovers and a jealous spouse. Therefore, it must be said. Hester bears no excuse for her actions but to have succumbed to blacker forces of the quickly beating heart."