Warm Milk

Burton sits poorly balanced on the creaking wooden chair Amber moved from the kitchen to the cramped living room because it doesn’t invite long stays. His repertoire of love poetry is extraordinary: he recites not just Shakespeare and the Brownings, but lyrical selections from Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Shelley, e e cummings, Neruda – the list begins to appear endless, and almost entirely male, Amber notices. Perhaps he only identifies with the men. Perhaps female passion embarrasses him. There are also his own poems, a few he’s working through for a forthcoming collection. It sounds romantic, a man writing love poetry, but she’s begun to regret her immediate embrace of the small town custom of leaving doors unlocked. Now locking the door would seem an aggression – but every night, he’s here. She finds excuses to come home later and later, always with the same result.

Amber is exhausted. Her feet hurt from a long run earlier and office hours left a headache that resists herbal tea and a damp cloth across her forehead, but she says, “Do you have a new poem for me tonight?” There is always another poem. To the rhythm of a Keats sonnet, she takes leftover Chinese from the fridge and eats it cold, legs curled under her on the half-collapsed sofa that Burton mercifully rejects as too difficult to rise from. The window AC strains so that he must raise his voice. The heat is like demonic possession, another presence under her skin.

When he pauses dramatically after the first two couplets, rasping the word “Eremite…,” Amber nods encouragingly. “Go on,” she says. She who listens to and reads poetry and prose all day, who has so much of it in her head that it sears like a rock saw, doesn’t dare tell him to stop or go away. She can’t afford to be patronizing and give him a hint because Burton controls her fate. He decides who’ll be kept on as lecturers in the fall and she’s just finished the MFA without finding a job. More than that, he’s a brutal critic and a spiteful enemy with the tenderest and most vindictive of egos. The other faculty avoid crossing him in the smallest things. He gets the top of the table at every meeting. At every reading, his name begins the list of introductory thank yous. Amber is ashamed to show cowardice in the face of bullying, but there it is.

Burton is richly impressed with his own talents as a writer and possesses the irrefutable laurels to confirm his opinion. The Pushcarts, the Pulitzer and National Book Award shortlists – never the win, though – and countless lesser decorations make him untouchable by normal forms of institutional discipline. He could stand in the main quadrangle and shoot a student and exculpatory excuses would be found. The faculty may mutter but the students are wholly in his thrall, including Amber in the beginning. She recognizes his genius and all she owes to the reflected glow of his proximity and approval, and, at the same time, sitting in a college apartment allocated to her by him for the summer session, she feels tingling in her arms and the urge to jump up and shove him off his chair into the biting metal edge of the wood stove. The sight of his blood, she thinks and immediately feels mortified by the thought, would heal her headache. What an unnatural, ungrateful person she is. Burton launches his next lines, oblivious to what lurks in her unfocused expression.

His proposition is unspoken yet thumps off the close walls like a percussive wave below audible levels, adding to the pressure in her head. He makes no secret of wanting her and she must receive without receiving, entice without teasing, to stay in his good graces without betraying herself. Such a fine line it’s barely there at all. If she’d known that staying for the summer would expose her to his attention like this, she’d have gone on the Canadian road trip with her high school friend Belinda who specializes in low-rent, pot-fueled adventure. Instead she’s a prisoner in her own living room, barring access to her person with the bound newspaper volumes she’s been skimming as background for a historical story. The thick print tapped out with inked movable letters has reinforcing solidity. She reads long columns about fires put out, real estate deals shaken on, and horse races won long before she was born, while Burton corrects himself and restarts his Keats stanza. He levers his bulk onto a different corner of the wooden chair, which gives up a low G groan.

Amber would have liked a literary suitor in the vein of Oscar Wilde (she knows, wrong church) or Arthur Miller, but instead she’s got a self-styled Hemingway after a long campaign of too much booze and too little bull running – bulbous, hairy, flatulent, although he tries to mask the latter with musky cologne that used to hold allure for Amber and now has all the appeal of cold bacon grease. She arrived at the university with all kinds of ideas about what the literary life would be and one by one the days are deleting them. Enough of her friends – writers and non-writers alike – have told her to grow up that she now keeps her fancies to herself, but it seems hard that none of them can be true.

Rather than running outside to turn the nearest hose on herself as she’d like to do, Amber observes Burton with all the power she’s cultivated. While she’s dressed defensively in a long, loose cotton dress that provides both coverage and the hope of a breeze beneath, he looks like a southern dandy gone courting. No one else on campus dresses this way, in crisp striped seersucker over a brilliant white shirt tailored so that it needn’t strain across his belly, two-tone spectator Oxford shoes, a lion-headed walking stick, and a silk pocket square with which he mops his brow as if lumbering through an F. Scott Fitzgerald fever dream. Amber’s impeccably working class background has taught her to be wary of upper class trappings, to hold her dignity around her as a shield against exploitation and diligently pretend to misunderstand Burton’s intent. In this way she’s better prepared for Burton’s improprieties than many of the female students would be.

Burton meets her gaze with a smirk. He’s so used to being applauded that he assumes all attention to be positive. Straining the lowly chair, he shifts from one pneumatic buttock to the other, a position that allows him to straighten his jacket, take the fullest breeze from the AC – while blocking its path toward Amber – and unfold his fingers to let light fall on his Masonic ring and another with a mottled piece of agate in an elaborate setting. The former was his father’s, he told her at their first meeting, adviser and advisee knee to knee on the loveseat in his office. He doesn’t go in for that kind of “mumbo jumbo” and besides, he’s an atheist, but he wears the ring for sentimental reasons, he says. Amber suspects it’s more for the aristocratic flair of a signet ring. The hand sits on an obscenely fleshy thigh but the ankle remains elegant in its shiny trouser sock above the flawless shoe as poetry issues from him like saltwater pouring from a sea cave, unstoppable as the tide.

Burton’s leer gives Amber the chance to catalog the striations of his hazel irises: some brown, a fleck of blue, and something unhealthily like yellow. Now that his poem is finished he begins to talk about his day, the little victories he’s tallied, a flattering honorarium offer.

“Of course an academic never really gets rich,” he says. She knows that true popular readership has eluded him, surely to his credit as an esoteric genius. “But this life has many compensations. Many compensations.” He brandishes the exquisite walking stick in both hands. “A gift from an admirer.” In a few minutes he’ll express disappointment in the fleeting rewards of critical success, which hasn’t given him all he deserved. “People forget so quickly. You’re only as important as your latest act of brilliance. You’re too young to know, but if you persist on this path, you’ll find out. No matter what you do, there’s always a new crop of competitors snapping at your heels. You have to stay sharp every minute. One day you’ll understand. You’ll see what a friend I am to prepare you.”

Burton issues frequent warnings of this sort, which Amber experiences not as girding for the future, as Burton seems to intend, but as a sense of present danger. Something is happening to her here and now that will change her in a terrifying way. The joy she’s always felt in her writing is waning, replaced by a terror that she’s entered a world where she’ll never be judged purely by the quality of her work but by more sinister rules to do with pleasing people like Burton. She’s more superstitious than she’s ever been – knocking on wood, avoiding ladders and black cats – as if she might store up luck for use elsewhere. Dreams of terrified flight startle her awake and she can’t remember what she was running from.

Perhaps, Amber thinks, she’s like Burton, and that’s why he’s drawn to her. Hasn’t she cynically allowed his attentions with the goals of getting this apartment, publishing in the university literary journal that he oversees like a king his fief, and landing one of the coveted lecturer slots? Hasn’t she entered into a backscratchers’ apprenticeship in which he’ll show her the levers to pull, how to weave her own irresistible web? The possibility makes her throat close. She starts to cough, goes for water, settles back onto the sofa.

The days of teaching drain her will to resist. Just what does Burton want of her in these evenings? Will the recitations satisfy him? She measures the distance between them with her eyes to ensure that it doesn’t diminish. The faces of undergraduates blur behind her eyelids. “Is it any good?” they like to ask, making her the arbiter of mysteries she hasn’t fathomed. They come to her with stories full of burnished innocence, some convinced of their own inner Steinbeck, others so uncertain that she’s surprised they had the nerve to apply for the program. Most of the writing is awkward and predictable, but she sifts like a miner for the sparks and holds them up, little jewels of light and promise, to give her students hope. They bring her gifts: bottles of beer, incense, sweets, less like colleagues than small children trying to please a beloved teacher.

In the evenings, avoiding the apartment, she goes to the coffee house or the library lounge and listens, mostly, to other grad students discuss their projects and prospects. Greg just won a fellowship he’s applied for five times. Najima’s found a New York agent after only a few months looking. Shelly’s had the same story rejected 38 times – you should see the spreadsheet – while revising constantly in workshop. There’s no apparent logic or meritocracy to any of it. The process seems structured to drive them all apeshit. Amber bakes to relieve stress and to have something to offer colleagues and students that will bring smiles to their faces. They smile so little. Sure, they’re all fed and clothed and sheltered but feeling that their creative work might never – probably will never – matter to anyone or see the published page is a vicious little first world torture made no easier by familial concern. When they get suicidal and say “Amber, I’m going to law school,” she tells them how brilliant they are and agrees to use her influence with Burton to try to get their stories into the university journal.

She knows that her influence can’t accomplish this.

Still, she forwards the story files to reviewers and continues to listen to the coffee house bitterness – how Burton’s blocking the advancement of talented students out of territoriality or fear of being exposed as a has-been by the fresh ideas of the new generation. The grad students say these things around her as an indirect way of confronting Burton, whom they fear. But Burton doesn’t know their names and rifles through pages of submissions printed for him, when he takes notice of them at all, lamenting, “Will no one ever write anything new?”

Amber prefers men but has no boyfriend, so the students speculate behind her back that she’s asexual, or has a long-distance relationship she keeps secret, or she’s Burton’s mistress. They like her so they talk about her, in kind but imaginative terms, asking each other why she’s in this backwater nursing overgrown egos rather than moving to Brooklyn to make her mark. Male and female, they make up stories to explain what she won’t and praise her pretty gentleness, the way she looks out for them with scarce resources. Her pace as she climbs the hill toward Writers’ House each morning is that of a dancer, so light her heels hardly strike the sidewalk. Certain of the students fall for her, pursue, meet frustration, and join the ranks of disappointed admirers. After two years completing her MFA, there’s a real club.

One young memoirist working on his tale of competing in the Tour de France as a domestique tries to impress her with his cycling skills. He sprints up the hill like a gazelle on a carbon fiber time trial bike and comes to a stop next to Amber to balance in a track stand, suspended in defiance of the laws of physics. Then, because his eyes are on Amber rather than the street, his front wheel slips into a sewer grate and he goes down hard, opening a bloody cut on his right knee against the curb. Amber has to jump to avoid being crushed. At lunch that day the cyclist comes to sit with her as she eats her sandwich on the lawn.

“I was scared I was going to fall on you,” he says. “Are you okay?”

Amber says she’s fine and asks after his knee. He brushes it off as nothing, although it’s heavily wrapped and blood shows through the bandage.

“Would you like to go riding with me this afternoon? We can borrow some mountain bikes. I know all the good trails.”

“Maybe another time. I have class, and then I have to write up comments for everyone.”

But there’s always something else to do. There will never be time for cycling trips. That afternoon, in appreciation for the steady supply of baked goods, a few undergrads in her workshop session present her with another bouquet they collected on a walk just outside town down one of the lanes where wildflowers grow in the ditches. She smiles and thanks them, standing at the second story window from which she can see the cyclist still out on the lawn, looking up at her wistfully. She sighs and wishes she hadn’t distracted him at just the wrong moment, and her students wonder why she now dislikes the flowers that pleased her in the past. She makes up her mind to give them to the cyclist, but by the time class is over he’s disappeared.

A poet named Ed with uncontrollably curly hair, another struggling new MFA, came to her door one night a few weeks into the summer session to offer a love poem he’d written for her, rolled up and tied with a golden ribbon. It was a bold step after a semester of shy invitations to bird watch with him, refused like everything else but so sweetly that he never felt the sting. The outdoor landing at the top of the stairs leading to her door was radiant with moonlight softened by stretched cotton candy clouds in a honeysuckle-scented night. Ed’s hair held the moonlight like a phantom crown as Amber nodded and held out her hand for the page. Behind him the horse chestnut that bloomed exuberantly in May and early June caught Amber’s attention. She only had to reach out her hand as she went up and down the stairs to skim over exploding little pyramids of pink and white flowers, a breathless delight. It pleased her that Ed should see it, she thought as his shadow lay on the doorsill. The horse chestnut was the sort of thing to lighten a poet’s heart.

“But I can’t accept this,” Amber told him. “You’re very kind, I’m just …”

From behind the door her blunt friend Christine from the nonfiction program rolled her eyes and mouthed, “Just take it so he’ll go away.”

“He’s from up around Boston,” Christine said as soon as the door was closed. “Never trust a Yankee.” But Christine’s quick fix meant that Ed came back the next night, the night after that, and on through the summer with scribbled verses until Burton began his visitations and Amber became scarce in general. When he couldn’t find her at home, Ed stalked her in a sad, non-threatening way, reading on a bench along the river path where she ran, never approaching but watching with a broken heart nearly visible on his crisp Yankee shirt sleeves.

After the initial jolt of realizing that he was there for her, to be in her presence however briefly, with eyes on her like a child watching a balloon float away, Amber forgot about him and carried on with her routine. He’d leave poems at her door for a season then forget all about her as soon as he found work in some fall-splendored northern valley full of familiar birds. This wasn’t the first student infatuation to fall at her feet unsought. She’s learning to handle them, she tells herself, these artistic young souls who haven’t yet learned to distinguish between a lifetime passion for their art and momentary infatuation with whatever pleasant creature crosses their path. A more serious, distracting engagement with them never occurs to her. She’s here for another reason. It seems to her that she used to know what it was, but the clarity that brought her has slipped away.

Teaching is a refuge. The undergrads come in supplication, so vulnerable and reverent, taking each notation on a page, each weighed word as talismans for the careers they dream of and can’t quite believe could ever be real. Amber is their guide through the wilderness, more familiar and trustworthy than the distant professors. She loves their earnest efforts – this word not that, do you get it? Does it come across, what I’m trying to do, they ask. She makes small adjustments and suggests new threads, nothing drastic, because underneath she’s a fraud who thinks writing can’t be taught. It’s a support group she’s running so she stays a step removed, like an AA sponsor. The students need an article of faith, a saint to pray to. It’s hard being a saint but she’s fallen into the habit.

Habit. Ha. Amber can still laugh at her own dumb puns. She thinks of habits, uniforms, and formalwear that would protect her more fully from Burton than the loose dress that falls across the swell of her bosom in spite of her best effort to resemble a human sofa cushion. She’ll be a saint with him, use that aura in self-defense. Burton is watching her, one hand on his belly like a pregnant woman’s, trying to puzzle out the mystery she presents. He asked her once if she’s a lesbian. No. Then why no boyfriend? She gave no real answer, just hummed a few notes and shrugged, as if there were no answer to give. He watches her also with the other students, looking for signs of where her favor lies. Her lack of response to him must have an explanation. He’s accustomed to women feeling the draw of his bearded masculinity, his advertised eminence.

“You need a good man,” Burton says. “Just wait. It’ll happen. A woman flowers in the presence of the right man.”

“Men make women messy,” Amber answers, looking out the window at one of the historic district’s old-fashioned street lamps, a sculpted sconce on a black column. It’s a line from a film, she doesn’t remember which, but Burton will probably know and tease her. When she looks back, he doesn’t seem to have heard, absorbed by the drape of the dress from one of her breasts to the other. The complacency in his gaze chills her. He’s so certain of getting what he wants. He begins another recitation, this time a snippet from Whitman – how comprehensive is the anthology in Burton’s head! – that makes her look back in embarrassment at the street lamp, still measuring the distance between them with the edge of her vision, never at ease.

To give credit, Burton has made the most of his talents. Other men might’ve ducked the risk of writing in favor of bitter middle management, but he proved himself in a fierce arena. The professorship, the books and their translations, the much younger wife, the plaques and letters on his office walls, it’s all scorekeeping in a winning match. Whatever he’s got – wit, ambition, base hungers, a ruthless instinct for hard truth – it’s worked. He’s told her about the tedious post-war suburban childhood he endured, how difficult it was to make himself something that glints a refracted color no one has seen before. Even when the young lions he scorns push him aside, his name will be inscribed in the record for as long as the record exists. Amber has to admire that, but admiration isn’t affection and it surely isn’t lust.

At the dull suburban high school they called him Scarecrow and he was cut from the basketball team but girls still chased him. He knew how to weave words into gold, play the long-haired suffering poet. There’ve been so many women, oh, he’s had his fill all along. Still does, truth be told, and Hannah need never know. Now it’s the eager acolytes filling his classroom and office, passing close for the gold dust to brush off onto them. He could have young men too, if that suited him. He’s not blind to their broad shoulders and hard bellies, but he loves the softness of the girls. Amber would be a particularly sweet pillow to rest on and in, more succulent for her resistance, but any of them would do. They come to him at all hours, wherever he goes, asking his advice and favors, making clear the quid pro quo available.

He makes sure that he has favors to dole out, from the coveted apartment Amber occupies to minor reader positions with the university journal – paying jobs, a resume line, offered magnanimously. Gradually, they all come to understand the commerce involved. This one will too. He calls them his mentees, his family, his pets. They don’t take offense. They’re thrilled to be held close, literally and figuratively, to the great man.

“But they’ll stab me in the back the moment they see a chance to climb over my dead body to get what they want,” he tells Amber with a humorless laugh. “That’s how the game is played.” She presses her knees together and pictures the invisible bodies under Burton’s wide feet. Once he described for her with contempt the first girl he loved, so prosaic, a cheerleader who mocked him in front of their English class and read his crude love poem aloud. “I’ve punished her by proxy a thousand times,” he says, puffing his chest with the memories of heartless conquests.

They never speak of Hannah, his wife. She was in Amber’s position not so long ago, brought along by Burton as a protégée. Her first book of short stories came out a decade ago to solid reviews and a few minor prize nominations, but within a few years she fell pregnant – Burton uses that phrase, as if Hannah had tripped and impaled herself on his fertile member – and has spent the last 8 years as primary caregiver to a rambunctious junior Burton whose needs preclude much writing time for his mother. Hannah gives no public sign of minding. The honor and responsibility of being the third Mrs. Burton inform her every movement. She nurtures the students and fetes the faculty at the gracious Victorian renovated and decorated by the second Mrs. Burton, whose name no one now speaks. Occasionally she does a reading or publishes a story in an anthology, if requested. Burton tells everyone except Amber that Hannah is pure gold. He wouldn’t know what to do without her.

Summers are difficult for Hannah, who knows from which direction trouble will come, because Burton habitually houses it in the student apartment associated with the graduate writing program. Just before each summer session begins, all Hannah has to do is walk up that street to watch love’s young dream carrying boxes up the steps, breasts straining against the inevitable snug shirt, to the rooms where Burton will perform the season’s drama. Hannah rages and makes him promise there will be no more, but like clockwork here is Amber. This year Hannah told him she wouldn’t tolerate it. Burton hitched up his pants and said, “If that’s how you feel, dear, I’ll just move into the Westin until we work this out.”

Their separation explains Burton’s unusual availability for late performances. Hannah is binge-watching Netflix home improvement shows in her den and Amber is wandering the streets, hoping that Burton will get tired of hotel living before the end of summer. She’s been with her students tonight, helping them shape up the final projects they’ll turn in a few weeks hence to earn their summer’s credit. Some of them worry her. They’re sensitive souls and the pressure of the program is getting to them. Her mind turns to Ed, whose poetry has turned darker as the season wanes. She consented to go for a walk with him just last week, to plumb the depths of the dark circles under his eyes. As always, he’s decimated by each critique, but the disinterest from both employers and publishers is sapping what resilience he started with. Increasingly, Amber’s encouragement and distractions don’t work. Ed is falling into a darkness where her light fails.

The hours passed too quickly tonight and in her worry over many things she started up her creaking steps without remembering to look for the light on above. Now she’s trapped in this overwarm room with Burton leaning just beyond her established personal space perimeter.

“I’m worried about Ed Reichert,” she says and gets up to click the AC a notch colder only to find it already at MAX. “Nothing’s worked out yet for him for fall.”

The mention of a student makes Burton testy. “I don’t have time for these mama’s boys who want their milk warmed. Let him join the Merchant Marines. Why do you spend so much time with the students? It’s much more advantageous to get to know the faculty.” He winks and chuckles. The care and feeding of students are the job of people like Hannah, the support staff of the universe, the wives and mothers who smooth down every psychological tremor by absorbing it into the infinite calm of their own bodies. “There’s no reason to be alone, you know. There are plenty of men interested in you. You can take your pick.”

Amber passes her eyes across him, nothing so confronting as a direct gaze. “This is my choice,” she answers.

Burton harrumphs against such nonsense, shuts his notebook, and launches his bulk from the hard chair. She’s gone too far. She feels the change in him. He makes his usual goodbye but Amber knows he won’t be back the following night. He and Hannah have a reading scheduled in the largest room of Writers’ House, performing a new piece he’s been working on. They and all the students will be wrapped up in the event and its after-party all evening. She’ll be free for at least one night, perhaps longer, if he and Hannah resolve whatever’s been holding them apart. Only a few weeks remain in the summer term. She wants to pack up and disappear but she needs the recommendation and Burton’s ongoing patronage. Even with him gone, the walls breathe like he does. Amber falls back into the sofa and pulls the dress up above her knees to feel cool air circulate across her thighs, as she’s longed to do since she got home.

Several blocks away Burton climbs the steps of the Victorian, past the gushing baskets of petunias along the porch, to turn the ornate door handle sourced on eBay by his ex-wife. It’s after Ernest’s bedtime and Hannah is in the living room, reading. She jumps up at the sound of the door and rushes to him, signs of crying and weariness around her blue eyes – his doing. There’s no anger or blame on her face, only relief. He feels a rush of affection at this greeting and takes her in his arms.

“My sweet Hannah,” he says, “how I’ve missed you. What were we thinking?” She kisses his cheeks and lips and draws him into the cool of the living room.

“Would you like iced tea?” she offers. “I have fresh mint.” In a few minutes she’s plying him with tea and cookies and helping him off with his dandy’s shoes, which she alone knows pinch his feet. The centrally cooled air is life itself rushing back into him. “I’m so sorry,” she says as he takes the first sip of tea. “Let’s forget it ever happened.”

In her bedroom where the air conditioning barely penetrates on a night as hot as this, Amber turns off the lights, takes off her clothes and lies bare-skinned on top of the thin blanket, limbs stretched out to catch any hint of a breeze. The idea of another person on the bed with her – even in imagination – is repulsive.

The next evening the meeting room is packed for the Burtons’ event. Amber arrives on the hour and takes a seat at the back, hoping to pass unnoticed by Hannah Burton, who’s been avoiding her at Writers’ House cocktail hours. On a platform before the crowd of over a hundred are two chairs behind a table with microphones. Randall Stoll, the new black director hired to rescue the program from charges of bias, shuffles his notes and clears his throat for the introduction, heavy on Burton’s resume and light on personal commentary. “A new work in progress,” Stoll intones, “that promises to be as stimulating and thought-provoking as the body of work we all admire so much.” That’s it, duty done. Burton and Hannah take their chairs.

For the first few minutes, Amber can’t follow. A phone call is happening. Burton is perfectly in type, dominating the conversation, making everything about him, but Hannah’s role starts out obscure. She’s calling herself Candy. Burton asks if that’s her real name and she says, “It can be anything you want it to be, honey.” Amber misses a few lines processing the dialogue. Can it really be – is Burton reenacting a 1-900 call on stage with his wife? A grimace of disgust moves across Amber’s face before she remembers to control it. She looks around to see if anyone is watching her, or having the same reaction. They all have the evaluative expressions writers bring to readings, like comics watching another comic, ready to nod approval at a mot juste. The fact that Burton’s cast Hannah as a sex worker in his employ, in public, seems not to have landed anywhere, least of all with Hannah, who simpers and enjoys this sensual turn outside the mundane hostess duties, grade school pickups and soccer sidelines that are her life now.

The Burtons continue. He wants an emotional connection, he’s lonely, that’s the twist. It’s nothing so sordid as mere phone sex, yet Candy resists. The script could be that of any night Burton’s spent in Amber’s apartment, pushing for more connection than she’s willing to give. The piece is about Burton’s ability to coerce women into interactions they don’t want. It’s so clear to Amber that she wants to shriek and run from the room but around her the faces are steady, even mildly amused at the repartee.

Amber lifts her chin to scan for Ed, satisfies herself that he isn’t there. She’s never known him to miss a faculty reading. A flare of worry lights and sears across her mind, eclipsing the scene up front. She begins to edge toward the corridor where she can slip out the nearest exit. Burton won’t notice. He’s preening at Hannah’s embarrassing submission – she might as well be naked up there with her legs spread for all the dignity he’s left her, Amber thinks – and lapping up the crowd’s enjoyment like a fat cat drinking warm milk. It’s a raw, cruel display of power. That Amber is the only one to see it makes her feel mildly insane.

She gains the little hall leading to the kitchen. She can slip out for fresh air, tamp down the nausea in her belly, check on Ed. One hand on the crash bar, she shuts her eyes and sees him lying on the couch in the tiny apartment where he hosted the class for beers. He had too many and passed out, like a kid. She remembers reaching out a hand to shake him awake, but there was no flinch or shift. For a second she’d been afraid, before she reassured herself that sleeping it off was the best thing. Now that fear returns, real and large and urgent. She opens her eyes to push through the door and begins to run across campus, hampered by the damn prairie dress. She lifts her skirt and stretches out her legs to full stride. Whatever’s happened to Ed, she’s as guilty as Burton. She’s done her jester’s dance in this evil little kingdom and the blood of the serfs is on her. Her heart pounds and she’s sweated through her dress before she reaches the peeling white door to Ed’s garage attic, the bell long deceased, hanging by a black wire, the cement stoop cracked in two.

She knocks hard on white painted glass. No answer. She tries the knob. The door is unlocked and gives easily under her push. She doesn’t have to step inside to see Ed suspended in shorts and Foo Fighters shirt from a cable tied to a beam at the top of the steps, puffy cheeks already fading from blue to gray. Amber freezes and stares, heart exploding, flares firing, incapable of speech or motion. The corpse sways slightly and she sways unconsciously with it until her shoulder hits the doorjamb and knocks her back to reality.

A flattened black flip-flop has fallen from Ed’s right foot and tumbled down the steps to rest almost at Amber’s eye level. She picks it up and holds it to her chest, shuts the door silently, and sits on the stoop, cradling the sandal. Heat rises from the cracked asphalt through her feet as possible reactions flow through her mind and limbs. There are things she must do, she thinks. She will do them in just a moment. In another moment. Not just yet. At last a clear thought surfaces, horrifying and true and exactly what Burton would think.

One day she’ll write about this.