Changing the Subject by Stephen-Paul Martin

Author:Stephen-Paul Martin [Martin, Stephen-Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Short Stories, Academic, Criticism, Drama, Poetry, Fiction
ISBN: 9781940400006
Amazon: 0963753657
Publisher: Ellipsis Press
Published: 2010-10-09T23:00:00+00:00

FOOD

Stopping in the middle of a sentence, distracted by thoughts about food, he closes the book without marking his place, even though it’s not time for a meal, even though the sentence was holding his interest, making the claim that mainstream reality doesn’t exist anymore, that at this point we can only talk about mainstream unreality, an assertion that’s not as simple as it sounds, not when the distinction between real and unreal has been relentlessly blurred by the mainstream itself, to such an extent that the mainstream exists only because real and unreal have become interchangeable terms, generating a confusion so pervasive that it hardly seems to exist, functioning as a background noise that you notice only when it’s not there anymore, but such moments of silence are unusual, difficult to recognize and even more difficult to sustain, provisional in a way that makes you feel insecure, like you need more control, the power to make such moments happen at will, as if the creation of silence were a skill you could learn in a classroom, but when the lesson appears on a blackboard, and the words are as precise as any professor could possibly make them, there’s something that won’t fall into place, something that still makes trouble, something that even experts are confused by, experts like Professor Food, a man who’s been teaching long enough to know what he’s talking about, long enough to know that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, standing in front of the classroom with a piece of chalk in his hand, saying things he’s learned to say by saying them over and over again, things he didn’t fully understand until he said them, as if unspoken words were like uninflated balloons, a figure of speech he enjoyed when he first came up with it, though he’s not sure now if words and balloons can really be compared, but he keeps producing the words and the faces facing him keep writing them down, concerned that what they don’t write down might work against them later, though some of them are distracted by what’s outside, by colors and faces and words on walls of billboards moving closer, blocking out most of the view from the classroom windows, making the classroom clock seem larger and louder than it really is, magnified seconds made of magnified nanoseconds ticking away, or not ticking away but stretching out and curling back on themselves, serpents flicking their tongues and flashing their fangs and eating their tails, while underneath the clock a student wants to raise her hand, a blond math major wearing high heels, a lumberjack shirt and a baseball hat, an outfit that makes a statement by refusing to make a statement, making several statements at once that cancel each other out, and she’s wondering why the billboards keep getting closer, wondering why the lesson is always the same, word by word and phrase by phrase not a syllable out of place, but she’s not sure how

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