Impressions from 501 - Preview

i.

The linguist professor is the new guy, fresh-faced, all clean lines, colorful ties, and ironed slacks. The shiny, professional façade fades at the end of each day when he leaves his office in cargo shorts, skateboard underneath one arm.

ii.

The ins and outs of various students are muffled, somewhat, by the silence of the regulars. Almost exclusively female, these pockets of still water read quietly while the world around them shuffles about, like particles in a dust storm meeting a particularly deep-rooted tree.

iii.

She doesn’t look like she’s from Kentucky; she doesn’t look like anyone from below the Mason-Dixon line with her high heels, patterned stockings and lion’s mane of blonde corkscrews. But sometimes she talks about Momma, chicken wire fences, and bare feet summers and maybe I could see her in scraped-knee jeans instead of pencil skirts.

iv.

Throat cancer took his hair, but not his brain, nor his chipper attitude. He strides long, like a black-necked stilt of his native Louisiana, and whistles like a fox sparrow underneath his fedora. His classes lay cuckoo eggs in our ears that hatch into vague feelers of ideas, burrowed somewhere in the unconscious until we collage it with the other wreckages of forgotten memory patterns that sleep in nests made of mirror shards and Christmas lights.