Nearly Complete Short Fiction by Julie E. Czerneda

Author:Julie E. Czerneda [Czerneda, Julie E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jerry eBooks
Published: 2025-06-15T21:00:00+00:00

Each math lecture hall had a pair of analog clocks, rumoured to have been scavenged from a school house that pre-dated the university on the same site by a century. They hung on the wall, one to the left, and one to the right of the stage. The left clock in Math Lecture Hall Two leered a nightmarishly permanent ten to twelve. The right clock still kept time, but on each sweep, its secondhand would stick at twenty-two after the hour. Students would stare at the motionless hand and wait, hardly daring to breath. And wait. When all hope seemed lost – the lecture to never end – the secondhand would spring to twenty-five, then tick around the rest of its circle. Until twenty-two after the hour came again.

Lecturers, guest or otherwise, were spared secondhand death through the simple expedient of being unable to see either clock from the stage. No matter. If they didn’t have a cell or watch to tell time, the growing shuffle of feet and closing of books as students stirred near the end was as good as an alarm clock.

Lecturers who weren’t Dr. Smith.

Dougie watched the secondhand stop. Again. At nine o’clock, Smith had launched with enthusiasm into what she called a relevant tangent: the vulnerability of rural politicians to well-organized quilting groups. As far as anyone could tell, she hadn’t left it. At nine twenty-five, when students stirred as students do, because the schedule said nine thirty and surely that meant the end, she merely raised an eyebrow. And her voice.

Nine thirty came and went. Putz whimpered.

Dougie scribbled another unreadable line, eyes back on the blurry page in case Smith looked his way. He’d long since lost the topic; words ran through his ears like wind through a bus window. Potent whiffs of fresh hand sanitizer assailed his nose without notice. Showers were optional midterm week; getting sick wasn’t. At least the detested smell helped him stay conscious. Gentle snores and the occasional thud of a plummeting book filled the air whenever Dr. Smith paused for breath. She continued, her tone grimmer by the minute.

The second hand stopped at twenty-two.

Putz snored.

Bas and Dougie elbowed him in the ribs simultaneously.

The secondhand jumped to twenty-five.

Nine thirty came and went. Dr. Smith had violated the sacred trust between undergrad and printed schedule. She was running overtime. Bas, who had minimal tolerance for misbehaviour or social excess by anyone, tenured or not, began to pointedly check his cell whenever Smith looked his way.

She stopped looking his way. Her arm pumped like a weight lifter’s as she drew sweeping lines across all three boards to connect phrases as readable as hieroglyphs, adding circles and triangles and nonsensical underlines. Chalk dust streaked her cardigan and coated her hair. It hung in clouds like a bar haunted by smokers’ past.

At nine forty-five, the girl in the rightmost seat of the second row bolted for the exit, careening down the steps, hair flying behind her. The air rushing through the opened door was like an elixir.

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