Pittsburgh Flash Fiction Gazette

The Girl Who Laid With Her Student

Not in the sense of lying brutally, painfully naked with another and crimping him irrevocably with her raw, denaturing slash. It was an awkward act—surgical even—and brought no comfort. She simply laid with them on the floor, bundled, the pipes and vents of their sexes exhaling only a soft wheeze of vapor beneath their clothes.

Who can imagine how it started–whether she removed her knit hat and her hair fanned with static, unconfined? Perhaps she dropped her bag at her feet and smiled at Nam, the Korean student, saying, “Good evening,” in the clean, standard tone she employed only with the foreign. And Nam, aching to say something real in his English, would have asked, “How are you?” in his robot halt. She would have reassured him neatly that she was fine, possibly adding that she was tired, with a short lapse into the petulance she felt at being made to sit there because of him. Excited that something had been admitted to him in English, he might have replied, “I’m so sorry,” using that perfect intermediate between the L and the R sounds that his teacher knew affectionately as the _bête noire_ of her Asian students.

And who is to say whether she blinked dramatically as she replied, “Not at all,” already contrite? Her eyes may have stayed closed a fraction longer than usual, refreshed, driving Nam to make the observation, “Wow, you look really”—and this word would have been all trill—”tired.” It may have been a little sexy to him, that this girl about his age, whom he contracted to sit with him and encourage and flatter, was experiencing something so intimate as sleepiness in his presence. It was almost erotic, the way she focused entirely on him, watching his face as he chose his words and correcting him gently when he made a mistake. He would repeat her correction, and she would always reply, “Good!” or “Perfect!” in such a gratified tone that he might have been rubbing her back. He had the vague notion that she was single: surely only someone entirely alone in the world could focus so intently on a male who had commissioned her.

By then, it would have been easy to determine that the fluorescent lights of the school, livid as they made the bright colors of the tables and fixtures—it seemed the decorator had been convinced that foreign students were happiest in a nursery school—were intolerable. After she had flicked the switch, a friendlier sentiment would have washed over her and Nam, a cave outside which there might be danger, making them protective of each other. The honorifics he had been thinking in, restrictive as a tight waistband, no longer applied. We can almost hear their nervous giggles as they retreated under the table, rattling the markers on top as they squeezed, and Nam, man of the house now, declaring, “Now you sleep, I watch.” Whether she jokingly, mockingly, patted his knee or whether she—just as irreverently—laid her head on his folded leg as a pillow has not been recorded. It was one of those conceits of sleep that women construct to invite an intimacy that is not yet sexual; they are usually misconstrued.

After a few minutes, when the settling in and stretching had been extinguished, she had really to lie there, and Nam likely realized that he could not actually remain hunched and watching the door for the whole of his two-hour tutorial. There is a little of the necrophiliac in all men, even Nam: they have gained many liberties under the narcotic warfare of sleep. Audacious now, he lifted her head like a lamp he meant to dust under and lay down beside her, touching only at a few rivets of his jeans and the sleeves of his shirt, right above the cuffs. Probably she made one of those sounds in sleep that indicated she was at peace, but pleasantly conscious of a warm, genial bulk next to her. And then, under the guise of fitfulness, they moved somehow together into a litterlike huddle. She would have felt a pressure below his waist, felted over yet distinct, like the hammers inside a piano. It could not have been addressed; there would have been nothing to do but sleep through it.

There were the sounds of distant classes proceeding as usual and phones being attended at the desk. They had the lovely, delicious feeling a napping child has when life continues in the house without her and she hears the light scuffs and sweeps of the benign, defensible acts the awake ones are performing.

Their shared half-consciousness would have broken as Nam’s watch, presciently set before he lay down, announced itself with a chirp and a dim blue searchlight. He would have shaken her shyly and smiled at her, and she would have levitated her upper half and applied her palm to her hair, fanning again toward him and the rug. He would have waited for her to speak, not knowing the correct expression in this language for returning to one’s life after something odd but pleasant has occurred.

“Well,” she would finally have said, standing and straightening the day’s folders so that their edges aligned, then opening the top one to the sheet where they signed, frowning studiously at the line, after each lesson. They would have been completely correct: carefully realigning the seams on their clothes before buttoning their coats, wishing each other a good evening. He might have wanted some sign from her, or she him, that this had been nice. In any case, they only searched each other’s faces for a moment before she said, “See you next week,” in the same cadence she always used when they emerged from the hushed autoclave of a lesson.

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BIO: T. M. De Vos is a poet and fiction writer living in New York City. Her work has appeared in Washington Square, Small Spiral Notebook, Yuan Yang: A Journal of Hong Kong and International Writing, Pebble Lake Review, Global City Review, Dark Sky Magazine, Alimentum: The Literature of Food, The Pedestal Magazine, The Saint Ann’s Review, and Ars Medica. She has taught at the University of Michigan, New York University, and in the New York City public school system. She received an MFA in 2004 from New York University and a Hopwood Award in 1999 from the University of Michigan.

T.M. De Vos
Assistant Fiction Editor, Many Mountains Moving
http://mmminc.org/html/staff/staff_t_m_de_Vos.htm