This Time, That Place by Clark Blaise

Author:Clark Blaise
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2022-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

Extractions and Contractions

Student Power

Leaving my office on the twelfth floor and boarding the elevator with ten students, I have this winter’s first seizure of claustrophobia. Eleven of us in heavy overcoats, crammed shoulder to shoulder in an overlit stainless steel box, burning up. The elevator opens on eleven and two students turn away, seeing that it’s full. We stop on ten but no one is waiting. We are trapped by the buttons other people press before they take the stairs. We will stop on every floor, it is one of those days, though we can take no one in and all of us, obviously, are dressed for the street. On eight as the doors open and no one presses ‘C’ to close them quickly, I have a sense of how we must appear to any onlooker—like a squad of Gothic statuary, eyes averted upward, silent, prayerful. On seven I sense there will be a student waiting as the door opens. He looks in, smiles, and we smile back. The doors do not close and we wait. He opens his briefcase and assembles a machine gun. We cannot move; we are somehow humiliated by overcrowding. No one presses ‘C’. A burst of fire catches us all, economically gunned down by a grinning student. The doors close and do not open again until we tumble out in the main lobby.

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