Spool

Written with my Thursday night group with the prompts:  do you have any new memories?, he was not ready, dream, we the people, but first the table of contents, he was actually nice to look at, mine mine mine, many details, the trouble with questions is that there are answers, a spool of thread (or dread), pain in their pockets, smell rose from the carpet, were you afraid of anything, hanging out, first step

In the first class, Professor Dally told us we would be spending the semester studying the phenomenon of questions that lead to answers that often spool into dread.

He said it just like that, though later more than half the class would swear he’d said “spool of thread.”  I had to allow that sounded metaphorically consistent, but I wasn’t sure it made much sense.  

“Dread?” the boy in the letter sweater repeated.  “You thought he said dread?”

I ignored his feigned credulity, laced as it was with sarcasm.  “But first,” I continued, intent on reconstructing the scene, “he sad, ‘turn to the table of contents.’”

“That’s right,” the girl with the nose ring agreed.  “He had us spend quite a long time on the table of contents.”

The boy in the leather jacket was pulling pain out of his pockets.  I could feel his vulnerability.  “I think I ended up in the wrong class,” he said sheepishly.  “I was prepared to recite the preamble to the constitution because I thought this was a law class.”

“We the People,” four students in the back row murmured as if on cue, and I twisted in my seat to look at them.  Turning back my gaze swept onto the face of the boy in the leather jacket and he looked at me as well.  He was actually nice to look at, and I had a premonition I would be gazing into these blue eyes a dozen times a day for years to come.  But not yet.  He wasn’t ready and neither was I.

The girl with the nose ring was intent on getting the many details right.  “This isn’t a law class,” she scoffed.  “This is the psych department.”

“Are you a psych major?” he asked me in a low voice.

“No, I just needed an elective,” I whispered.  “This sounded fun:  dreams, memories, fears.”

The head of the department who had taken over for Professor Dally, pounded the podium.  “I need to finish this report, so settle down.”

We quickly went silent.  None of us wanted to hang out in a classroom where our prof was now nothing more than a smell rising from the carpet, but it was hard to know if the dean wanted to know what happened or if we were part of an elaborate experiment o gauge our reaction to our teacher’s sudden demise.  Was any of this real?

“So,” the dean continued, “when this happened, were you afraid of anything?”  I could hear the uneasy shifting of feet and backsides on uncomfortable seats.  “Did it spark any memories?” he asked frantically, fishing for intriguing replies.

“I’d like to make some new ones,” the boy in the leather jacket said to me as he offered his arm.  “Let’s get out of here.”

I grabbed his elbow.  Mine, mine, mine, I heard my heart whisper.  A new chapter perhaps?  A first step.  We ducked out the side door.

Photo by Sichen Xiang on Unsplash