The day I met Jodi was five years ago on May 10th, the same day I slept through my graduation ceremony. I woke that morning to the seismic influx of notifications, thinking some catastrophe struck. But the world hadn’t ended, all merely messages from my college friend Jeanine, who sent a dozen permutations of “where are you??” and then later messages in all caps: “SRSLY, WYA?” My mother and father were sitting in the stadium already. The time was 10:07 am, the undergraduates already seated under the hot sun, the graduate students still shuffling in.
I laid numbly in the shady part of my room, on top of the stiff bed adjacent to the movie posters and images of old singers, poems, postcards from across the country. I stared at the light bouncing on my $80 robe and felt disbelief flood inside me. I theorized I’d been asleep for all four college years and an evil twin took over my body. Or my life was just a screen and stuck in a Truman Show-esque simulation; the show runners thought I was too stupid to realize, though actually, I wanted the little show to run just a bit longer.
In high school, I experienced fainting spells. The doctor believed my condition to be tachycardia and in each moment of collapse, my heart pounded signals of weakness that overtook the rest of my body and flashes of color appeared in my vision as if a screen of pastel glass glossed over my sight, then images displaced by deepened hues until all sight coalesced into unconscious black. At 18, I thought my life or the revolving world might stop spinning, but nothing happened. I swallowed little pills that fixed the fainting. Apparently cured, I went to college. The world kept moving, refusing to slow or stop, every life propelling forward by some force still unknown to me. I awaited my liberal arts education to impress knowledge upon me of how to live; the other lives around me radiated with the hormonal buzz of sex, the chase of perfect GPAs, and the search for humorous, attractive company. All while I stayed tired by the pills. My heart no longer raced but the back of my eyelids burned and demanded rest. Each day was a cup of coffee, a book, and sleep. That same cycle until the day became May 10th, when I woke and it was time to graduate.
I departed the bed and prepared myself for the day like it was an ordinary one. I felt in no rush, uncaring of the pomp and circumstance and understood it’d be quickly over. Soon, I would officially have missed my graduation ceremony. My mother selected my dress for the occasion, an itchy green garment that hung awkwardly on my boxy frame. I felt like a lump of skin encased in a cocoon. Thankfully, the black robe swallowed my entire body. I didn’t put the graduation cap on, instead held it in my hand. The tassel bounced as I moved. The weather app claimed it was nearly a hundred degrees outside.
When I arrived outside the stadium, I found my parents, who declared the ceremony beautiful. We all said nothing of my absence. My mother used a crumpled tissue to dab the tears running down her pancake makeup. We found a stranger to take photos of us. All smiles. In the crowds of chatter I imagined Jeanine shrieking and angry so I led my parents, weaving through the arranged circles of families. I went to the building across the library in search of my advisor, who perched herself very still on a wooden chair. Bird-like eyes, unblinking trance before her phone. She couldn’t seem to remember me, asked for my last name then peeked open the leather binding to reveal the tinted paper. Congratulations, she said, her voice echoing in the hollow office.
Nobody was in the library. Swallowed by the tall wooden shelves, I recognized a grief within me. I realized all the time I’d lost. Only remembrances of quotes and the timeline of books read each semester, the physical collection attesting to my memory, and the beat-up spiral notebooks filled with notes and diaristic accounts on the things I read, the only documentation that proved I existed these four years. At the time, all these little write-ups and the novels moved and engulfed me like eternity that suddenly closed in on itself at that very moment. I said goodbye to the library and all the books it contained.
My classmates were moving on, even most of the other English majors. Even Jeanine who often struggled with obedience and instructions found a job. She, like me, studied English but would be moving to Seattle in August to do something “serious.” That’s how my mother put it, my mother who asked one day what Jeanine was doing with her lucrative English degree and I said she was going to be a software engineer. How lovely, my mother said. That’s rather serious.
Jeanine messaged me again that afternoon to meet but I clicked my phone off and I would never message her again, though I did initially plan to reply. Mentally, I composed a delayed response, claiming I tried to search for her, but my family became too swept up with lunch arrangements. It’d been true; my mother made reservations at a steakhouse in town for one o’clock. It’d been ten past noon when I whined about feeling tired. My mother asked if I’d taken my pills. I wandered for coffee before lunch, and in search of this coffee was when I met Jodi, still a nameless figure at the time. Inside the wooden interior of the Oak House, many graduates and families sat inside speaking and laughing loudly. My parents waited outside, fanning their faces with paper programs from the ceremony. A long queue formed from the register and spiraled around small circular tables. I stood behind an older woman with grayed hair braided down her spine, and she stood behind five other figures. I peeked over the older woman’s shoulder to study the nameless barista.
That day, Jodi seemed at ease with the chaotic surroundings, artfully navigating the bar with casual effort. Though she was not apathetic to all she was occupied with, instead treating the pile of drink orders with delicate control and focus. Towards customers she greeted them with a happy smile and occasionally laughed. Her two shiny eyes reflected the glow of the shop’s fluorescent lights, the same eyes that then burned into mind. Her glossy eyeballs moved from the customer by the register to right at me, rendering the act of looking into an oppressive, unbearable heat like fire. I flushed with embarrassment and my body numbed itself with nausea. I regretted the coffee, considered leaving but knew I wouldn’t because how could I leave a moment I then perceived with blind, delusional confidence was love at first sight? She continued to stare. Never had I felt so jolted. Never had I felt I couldn’t move at all, all physical faculties displaced by the moment and transfixed by the figure a mere few yards away. I thought I was pathetic. I thought I was ugly in my cocoon dress. I despaired the moment I would approach and order. Would my mouth know how to open? Did it remember the basics of forming words? Words, fiery hot, piercing, racing through my mind, scalded me from different directions, then played on top of each other in loud, obnoxious layers rattling my mind, intense distress from unnerving nerves. Coffee order, the beauty of barista’s movements. Beauty, that thing that would ruin me. I looked out the window at the backs of my mother and father, who stood with good posture as they waited, entirely unburdened by the need to speak. I lamented words and the impossibility of ever knowing whether they could really harness the intangible into tangible, and if say it was possible, then what attributes of my language were I missing to express myself in the most accurate, resolute way?
It became my turn to order and my legs miraculously claimed their ability to make slow strides forward. For all the antsy panic, the encounter passed simply and quickly: I said I would like a coffee and she asked me for my name. I answered, but I didn’t dare ask for hers. She then filled a Portafilter with coffee grounds before twisting the handle beneath a latch. I waited on the other side of the counter, still looking at her, still begging my inconsolable restlessness to simmer down, when suddenly a thought emerged: I would be a barista. The idea erupted and overtook me with an exhilarating thrill, akin to the feelings of jitters upon a completed coffee. I laughed, I didn’t need the coffee at all! No longer tired, I was shaking, musing on how I had just reached the most perfect, poetic decision of my life.
The barista read my name written on a cup in a bright, clear voice. I picked up the cup with my name and drank a bold sip that charged me with an additional jolt of excitement, the exact nudge of courage I needed to approach the barista again and once I was stood in front of her, I asked: Are you hiring? The beautiful barista smiled, then handed me a business card that listed an email address for Ronnie and Jen.
The Oak House opened in 1972, by two former folk musicians. The shop itself hadn’t changed much since then, only the interior surrendered itself to the wear of old wood and peeling plaster. Nearly all the customers that came in and out were regulars, musicians who sat on the stools in a row from morning til closing, nothing to do but wait for the day to convert into lyrics and bar poems, all broke and paid for coffees with the stacks of quarters jangling in their pockets. Punk musician Sammie King was amongst this group of slumming and impoverished until a song of hers catapulted her into a dim spotlight, then she got signed and more of her songs started playing on the radio. Towards the end of her career, she wrote a memoir. I only knew of Sammie because of this memoir, in which she mentions the Oak House in multiple passages. She even maintained the status of a regular after the folk musicians died and ownership transferred to Ronnie and Jen, two wives who adored Sammie King and danced to her songs at their wedding. Then Sammie died, Ronnie and Jen vowed to only play her music in the shop. They established other rules, too: you could only work there if you were queer or they approved your taste in music and books. When I sent them an email asking for a job, they invited me to come have a chat the next day, when they asked what I thought about Sammie King and I listed my favorite songs and how a certain album reminded me of Eileen Myles’ work. Jen looked at me smug, Ronnie laughed, and I was hired.
The morning of my first shift arrived quietly and my body felt uneasy by the emptiness of the street. With no key yet, I waited outside, until a lean-legged figure approached: it was Jodi. I recognized her and the absence of her long hair, replaced with a shapened pixie that sculpted her face into angular features. She appeared lovely to me. Hello, she greeted me in a pleasant voice, then informed me she would train me.
Jodi explained the differences in ratio between milk to espresso in a flat white, latte, and macchiato, performing the pouring of froth in mugs topped with foamy designs. I sipped on these drinks and listened carefully to her other instructions: the code for the supply closet, where various utensils were stored, how to ring up a customer on the register. She knew the orders for the regulars who greeted her and she made their same-old drinks. Sammie King played throughout the shift; jagged lyrics painted a fragmented image of the town. A lifted sleeve revealed a pine tree inked in her wrist. Eventually the shift approached its end and all the customers were gone and left the place hollow. I struggled to breathe, as if the customers left with all the air. Jodi turned off the Sammie King songs and changed the system to shuffle Wilco songs instead. She asked if I was okay, that I didn’t look so good. Even the kindness of her concern stunned me, and I suddenly felt very self-conscious of my appearance. I sat down. She handed me a cloth to dry the utensils she rinsed in the metal sink. The scorching water reddened her skin. She appeared unbothered by the heat. We said nothing. The spoons clinked as I dropped one utensil on top of another. Jodi started wiping down a countertop. I said I was feeling better and could help do something else. She said we could take out the trash and then we’d be done. Hurled three large trash bags into the dumpster, then walked to the parking lot. The air was stale and the cicadas hissed their noisy song. I waved goodbye to her as she entered her small Camry. She turned sideways as she backed out and I stared at her boyish looking head. The overhanging street lamp glinted light on the car. She looked back at me again, rolled the windows down. A song was echoing from the inside. See you later, she said.
But I didn’t see Jodi later. Ronnie sent weekly emails with the schedule attached. And week by week, I searched for her name in the rows of cells; none ever listed her name. I learned later she apparently always worked sporadically, asking my co-worker Lee about Jodi and in response they merely shrugged and said, That’s how it is, a response that struck me as odd but I didn’t press further.
I was working nearly every day and each shift blurred together. Each day revolved around continuous orders and the influx of customers whose influx obeyed the timing of morning rush hour; hands and their movement instructed by tasks; the noises of laughter and the impatience of customers; Sammie King songs churned over and over, and this big ball of inanity grew in time.
Weeks passed, until one Tuesday afternoon, Lee messaged me to say they would not be able to join me during our shift. They had an abrupt family emergency and would be flying across the country; I would be working the afternoon alone. Upon entering the Oak House, a woman was behind the counter and I saw the back of a shaven head. The woman’s turning around revealed her face, which I recognized as Jodi’s, and the face of hers flashed a grin. She had even less hair now. Her eyes shone beneath the lights; she asked how I was, how I liked working at the Oak House so far. We spoke about regulars of the cafe, our co-workers, songs, novels, coffee, but never touched on her absence. She asked if she might let me borrow a book and I said sure. Eventually, the conversation converted to the undertaking of orders, each minute passed through the opening and closing of milk cartons and capping plastic lids on completed drinks until they hours passed. By four o’clock, all the leftover patrons shuffled out, leaving the place a barren husk animated solely by our two figures.
After twisting a key through a hole in the door to lock the shop, we stood outside on the pavement of the parking lot. Jodi leaned against her old Camry, asked if I needed a ride, a question that struck me as odd because she hadn’t asked the evening of my initial shift. No, I said, then turned to look at the cafe that looked back dimmed and dead. I live close enough to walk, I explained. I was holding an iced tea I poured for myself earlier and it was wetting my hand. Could I see your books? I said sure, then took a long sip of my tea. She suggested we walk because of the nice weather, and though I did not agree with her assessment of the humid, sticky air, I agreed to the walk and we began to make headway towards my apartment.
Throughout our walk Jodi seemed spacey and irritated. I worried if my presence offended her, even though she’d suggested the walk to my place. After a long period of silence, she suddenly announced her appreciation for Ronnie and Jen, who seemed to her like lesbian godmothers, and I smiled at this statement. They practically saved my life during the pandemic, she sighed.
I opened the door to my apartment and flipped open a light switch. We walked in like it was a normal occurrence, as if Jodi had spent time here hundreds of times before. Jodi made no remarks about the place and did not look around, though she seemed in the mood to talk still, as she proceeded to describe her hatred of college and how everything had been made virtual. She hated going to school online and all the blank stares caged in ugly squares. After she dropped out of college she buried her phone in the backyard.
I asked Jodi if she would like anything to drink. She sat at the dining table, shaking her head no, then tilting it to read the spines of books laid in a small stack on the table. I owned no shelf so I haphazardly scattered my collection on the dining table, the floor, the bed, etc. The ice was entirely melted in my tea and I poured it out, throwing the plastic container out too. I poured myself a glass of water. I asked what she studied in college before dropping out. I never decided, she said. She listed what she had taken: two Italian courses, an art history seminar on Roman art, and introductory lectures in environmental science, economics, photography, and computer science. I asked her how her parents reacted to her dropping out of college. The dulling light from outside casted shadows below her nose and on her neck. Her face was a little shiny and cast a glow on top of her face, slightly reddened from the heat.
She thought about my question then looked down at the table, where her hands rested limply. She said her father was no longer in her life. I considered saying I was sorry, but it seemed like the wrong response. She continued, describing how when she was twelve her father left her mother for another woman, moved across the country to Reno when she was in high school. Her mother was jobless and never finished college either. She joked her inability to complete college might be a genetic defect. Her father mailed an envelope with $500 every year in May. She only received a Merry Christmas text and a birthday call each year, and that’d be all she ever heard from him. Eventually, she stopped replying to his texts or answering his calls, then the messages became unreceived once she cancelled her phone plan and buried the phone. She still hadn’t repurchased a new one. She composed a letter denouncing him as her father and he stopped sending the money shortly after. Initially, she thought the two events were connected, but in actuality, he simply died. Upon reaching the part of the story where he died, she paused and smiled.
A few years ago, Jodi continued, my mother received a call with news that he died from the virus. His wife called. He was on vacation with her in Vancouver when the rapid spread of the virus began. They didn’t return home for some reason. The wife only just returned home when she called. There would be a funeral eventually but no one could travel at the time. She didn’t say much, maybe didn’t know what to say. Around that time I dropped out of school, and then met Ronnie and Jen.
We sat by the table and talked for another hour. She asked me questions about studying English at the local university, and wanted to know if I found poems or fiction easier to read. Fiction. What books do you like to read? This and that. I listed a few authors. What were your classmates like? A little bit of everything. And then I paused, then suddenly thought about Jeanine. They’re nice. But most people come from upper middle class backgrounds and have a mild case of being self-absorbed. And you, you’re from an upper middle class background too? I smiled. Yes, I am. Can you tell I’m self-absorbed, too? Then she smiled too and laughed a very pretty laugh. No, not yet. It must have been around eight and the sun was setting. I turned on the overhead light.
I should get going, she said, but did not remove herself from her seated position at the table. She stared at the books again on the table. She opened her mouth slightly as if on the verge of uttering something, but she remained entirely silent and still besides a single tear that trickled down her cheek. She then said she wished to try again with her life, whether I thought there was a way to speak new life into existence. I said of course she could still try again, she was still very young. She smiled in a sad expression, like I hadn’t quite understood her, then finally rose from her seat.
We stood close together by the door and I realized how she was slightly shorter than me. I looked down at her face to see how all the tears wet her cheeks with a shiny glean. I turned to my side and said I would grab her a tissue, but before taking a step, I paused. She placed one of her hands in mine and folded herself into me. In this embraced arrangement, my hands touched the icy cold surface of her skin and my heart quickened in rhythm. She asked if it’d be alright if she actually stayed for the evening and I guided her upstairs to my bed, where she laid turning away from me, staring at the small stack of books by my bed. As we laid, she asked me to hold her, so I wrapped my body around hers which remained restless in shaking until it eventually relaxed into the subtle rise and slow fall of her breath.
The next morning, I found my lone body in the middle of the bed. Jodi was gone and left no note. In fact, my apartment contained no evidence of any presence having graced my evening. However, beside the bed I found my books knocked over from its stack and rearranged. The books normally rested in the particular order of what I read most recently, an order I tracked in my notebooks and had been doing so for many years. Thanks to this record, I could recall how The Bluest Eye was assigned to us before Christmas break my sophomore year of high school; The Great Gatsby was the last text I ever studied in high school; Great Expectations taught the fall semester of my junior year, the same course which also assigned Jane Eyre, Goblin Market, and an excerpt from Rousseau’s Emile, and all of this information remained listed and stored in notebooks that I filled due to compulsion though I maintained knowing they held no real practical use, until that morning, when I flipped to the most recent entries listing the books in the stack by my bed.
A collection of short stories by Cortozar and then Bolano, followed by Neruda’s poems, of which enveloped me from a phase in Latin American writers to poetry: Anne Carson, Louise Gluck, and Eileen Myles, and then I was most recently working through a copy of Sammie King’s biography, so it was listed as the latest entry. On the ground, the books were in a disordered arrangement: the Bolano shuffled in the middle, beneath the Gluck which was laid at the top of the sprawl; the Myles next to Neruda, which was tucked behind the same corner as the Cortozar and Carson. Excluded from the arrangement was Sammie King’s book, which had disappeared entirely.
There was no sign of Jodi in the kitchen or bathroom. She somehow left while locking the front door. The keys rested on the dining table. I replayed the prior day’s events, beginning from my first sight of Jodi at the Oak House, walking to my apartment, listening to her confess the details about her life, to then her sudden tears, our embrace, then eventual sleep. Each time I repeated the events, the order of the story rearranged itself in different timelines and the details of our conversation began to warp in new combinations. I wondered if she lied about the details of her life, then wondered if I was lying to myself about her existence. I grew wary over my memory and its ability to retain events in a faithful manner.
Though I knew my searching for Jodi or the biography would arrive at no avail, I could not trust my mind and its toiling of theories about how past events transpired, so I thought to apply myself tangibly, searching for evidence that might ground me in a sense of reality. I rifled through the apartment, kicking down my stacks of books and then studying each cover. Books were still books, fortunately, and upon skimming I confirmed how each retained the same characters and plots I loosely recalled. Though of course, none of the books I looked through were the Sammie King biography.
I then decided to search beyond the apartment. My stomach lurched as if empty, not from hunger but like I owned no stomach at all. I lugged my stomach-less body to the Oak House, tapping my fingers on the flat screen of my phone as I walked. I plugged the end of my headphones into the jack of my phone’s bottom and hit play for a song but then found the noise too noisy, so I paused the song and opened my text messages. The list of contacts and unread messages prompted no desire to speak or be spoken to, instead deepening the craving for an answer of a seemingly unanswerable question at the time: where was Jodi? I turned off the phone but kept it in my hand, vexing at the thin solid brick’s potential to communicate but inability to do so in a way l truly desired. Through the tinted window of the Oak House I saw Ronnie sitting by the register beside a pair of arms flailing in red flannel sleeves. Ronnie greeted me when I went inside, then asked if I was scheduled. The person in flannel was no longer behind the bar. No, I smiled, just stopping by. I then asked for a cup of coffee and Ronnie yelled for someone to bring a mug of it from the backroom.
Is Jodi around? I asked, and Jen, in red flannel sleeves, emerged from the kitchen with coffee in a small white cup. She slid the cup to me and the liquid rattled. Hmm? Jen asked, her voice quivering like the shaking cup. Jodi, I repeated, is she around? Hot air floated into itself before evaporating into nothing. Jen then looked over to Ronnie, curious whether Ronnie might know who I was asking for, but Ronnie shook her head and pursed her lips, Who’s that, hon? I wondered again if my imagination might be playing tricks on me; perhaps the entire establishment, the steam of the coffee, Ronnie and Jen’s bodies, the street and sun outside were all an elaborate fiction by me. Never mind, I said, embarrassed and distressed by what else I might discover as missing if I probed any further.
Feeling suddenly cold, as if the empty vortex that swallowed my stomach were swallowing the other organs in my body, I wrapped my hands around the scorching cup of coffee. My eyes stared at all the patrons and their eyes, all perfectly still and reflecting the glow of their devices, shiny screens with flashy, ever-changing images that made their pupils widen, jet-black portals displacing the pictures from the surface, seen and then processed into a raging kaleidoscope of noise and colors whirling inside their bodies. On occasion, these figures removed their gaze from deep concentration on the screen and reguided their attention to the steaming drinks, lifting their handles then tilting to fill their mouths with coffee. Seeing these figures drink their coffee reminded me of my own cup and my own mouth, and so in mimicry, I attempted to fill my empty body: I opened my mouth a little and poured the hot drink inside of myself.
After I left the Oak House, I walked down the street with no destination in mind, and moved straight towards the blazing sun. The glare of the beaming light stung my vision; I saw all but a haze of glow. I prayed the sun might blind me into sense. Upon reaching the shaded canopy of a dark green awning, I stopped walking, and once my vision recovered itself I understood I arrived at the local bookstore, the same location I purchased Sammie King’s biography a few months prior.
I pushed the door and its attached little bell jangled, playing its noise over a Velvet Underground song. A youngish, mustached man flipped the pages of his book by the cash register. I approached the fiction section and began browsing, running my quivering index finger down the spines of each book. The speaker played noisy piano keys that danced in my mind and a fragmentary image of Jodi nearly appeared before disappearing into emptiness. The song approached an abrupt false end before a woman’s voice sang again. My eyes whirred over the author’s names and stopped upon a name I vaguely remembered. I searched the title on the internet but my phone wouldn’t load any results because of the service in the building. With the phone in my hand, I was reminded again of the communicable powers of the phone, but disempowered with no one to call, I returned the device in my pocket and tucked the book under my armpit.
I proceeded to browse beneath the echoing music. A new song played. I glanced back at the reading man and up at the clock above him, almost noon then, no one in the store besides me and the cashier. I walked towards the biography section in search of the Sammie King biography. No appearance of the book in the ‘K’ section. I looked at the other books in the category and noticed a slim, black-spine paperback. I pulled out the copy, revealing the small portrait of a woman’s face in the center of the front cover. The woman was Jodi. The other book slipped from my armpit and fell to the dirt-stained tile while my transfixed and immovable gaze remained on the book in my hands. The photograph included a slight margin on top of the woman’s head and the cropping sliced her torso below the shoulders. The woman’s hair was long, like the first time I saw Jodi. The image was toned in a wash of sepia, treated like the cover of Sammie King in her lost book. Despite my immediate identification of the woman on the cover as Jodi, I doubted this claim, as I no longer trusted my remembrance of her face or my memory’s encounter with her. Experience, so necessary to form a sense of shelf, shattered and lost its quality of reliability and logos. My hands gripped the book tightly, for fear the book may suddenly disappear if I were to relax my grasp. A slight tear on the back. The book was author-less and titled My Last Evening. I flipped through the pages haphazardly but all the words appeared to me like dancing ants, all non-meaning gibberish I couldn’t comprehend.
I picked up the book on the ground with my hands that now felt hollow and light, then returned it to the shelf in the fiction section. Lou Reed wailed over the wacky instrumentals in a song I recognized: “The Murder Mystery”. My chest was pulsating in parallel with the song’s rhythm and I wondered if I might be approaching some fatal end. The book might kill me, I theorized. There seemed, to me, no reason why death couldn’t happen at any moment.
But for a while longer, life persisted, and I moved along it. The cashier finished his sentence before setting his book aside. A collection of Chekov’s stories. He charged me $7 and I handed him a ten dollar bill from my back pocket. Uncaring about the change, I proceeded to leave but when the man said wait I waited, then he handed me a few bills I fed directly into the book’s front page like a bookmark, then finally I left the store and moved towards the Oak House. I stood before the tinted glass to search again for Jodi, an inspection I knew would fail before even looking, and upon looking I confirmed the loss of her presence for what I could already feel would be forever. I looked back at the face on the book, then returned my glance at the path before me, feeling an immense weight in my hollow hands despite the book being no heavier than a few mere ounces.
Looking right then looking left on the black, hot asphalt, I deemed it safe to cross before moving ahead. A few more minutes then passed and I was still in motion. Another blank lapse of time passed, then suddenly I was no longer moving and in front of my apartment door. Unsure how I made it there, unwilling to question anything anymore, my mind decided against asking any questions or forming any more possibilities. I looked down at my hands to confirm I still had hands, then confirmed the book remained in my still-existing hands. I unlocked the door and made myself another coffee to fill my body with something. Even while making coffee, I kept the book in my right hand. With my left, I stirred the coffee with a teaspoon of sugar. I checked my phone and it was somehow dead despite my little use of it that day. I set it aside, unconcerned whether it might stay dead or disappear, and in fact hoped it would somehow go away entirely. Then I held my book and the cup of coffee to all my scattered books and descended to the ground. Three George Washington bills fell out as I attempted to begin the book. Upon opening the binding, I revealed a book of only blank pages.
Ruby Wang is from North Carolina and a current MFA student at UMass Amherst.