Nicole Efford is a senior at the College of William and Mary, majoring in English and minoring in Creative Writing.

Absolution in Her Red Eyes

Mara helps her mother out of the pew, hoping nobody will notice them slipping out before the end of service. She’d realized her mom was high when she came back from the bathroom, ten minutes into service, with eyes red and half-closed.

“Hope, hi. How are you?” Todd Baker whispers, blocking the door. His hair is pomaded high on his head—reaching for Jesus, Mara thinks.

She smiles innocently and says, “My mom’s not feeling too well right now. I should be getting her home.”

Todd’s eyes linger on Hope’s arm, and then meet her eyes. She stares back at him, unblinking, then drawls, “You are a sinner.”

He chuckles and shakes his head, “Well, we all are. But Jesus absolved us, Hope, you know that.”

“Mom, c’mon.” Mara says as she tugs on her mother’s arm.

“That’s probably a good idea, Mara. Do you need any help getting her to the car?”

Hope watches the man grow a red tail, then jabs her finger into Todd’s face and shouts, “Get away from my daughter!”

“Mom, stop!” Mara grabs Hope’s hand and pushes past the exit. “She’s really not feeling herself!” she calls over her shoulder, rushing toward the parking lot.

Mara gets in their car but Hope does not.

There is a demon in her car—Hope knows it. God has visited her and He has given her the power to detect evil. Hope stares as the demon in the driver’s seat grows two red horns. It is talking to her but she cannot understand; she has too much Heaven within her to speak to children of Hell. She shakes her head at the demon, “I will not go with you.”

Mara stares at her mother in disbelief. “You need to come with me. How else are you going to get home?” She lowers her voice so nobody around the church will hear, “You can’t go walking the streets doped up, mom. Get in the car.”

Mara’s words get through to her mother, and Hope recognizes that the demon in her car is her daughter. The demon pleads again, “Please, mom, let me just take you home and get you to bed.”

“You are not my child anymore,” Hope spits. She gets on her knees and pulls the cross up from around her neck to ward away the demon. “You, child of the Devil—with the power of God the Almighty, I banish you back to Hell!”

Mara glares at her mother, and then notices the silence surrounding them. She looks in the rearview mirror: Service has ended and people from church are staring. “I’m sorry, mom,” Mara says. She backs out of the spot, slowly, so that she doesn’t hit her. She puts the car in drive, and leaves her mother in the parking lot.

Hope gets off her knees and tucks her necklace back under her cardigan. The Devil has gone. She has saved her church. She smiles, sits back on the parking lot ground, and smiles up at the sky.

Niles Reddick is author of the novel Pulitzer nominated Drifting too far from the Shore, a collection Road Kill Art and Other Oddities, and a novella Lead Me Home. His work has been featured in eleven anthologies/collections and in over a hundred and fifty literary magazines all over the world including PIF, Drunk Monkeys, Spelk, Cheap Pop, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Slice of Life, Faircloth Review, With Painted Words, among many others. His new collection Reading the Coffee Grounds was just released. His website is www.nilesreddick.com

Silent Crushes

The teenage girls decided to end their semester at school with a spend-the-night party. They ordered pizza, made sugar cookies, drank hot chocolate, and decided to watch Hallmark movies. Mostly, they talked about boys who they thought the teachers liked better and who mostly ignored them and preferred sports, hunting, or video games.

The parents who allowed them to flop at their house in pajamas too short for anyone never heard the kitchen door shut or the teens pile in two cars parked by the street and leave the subdivision to head directly into another subdivision. The parents had nodded in recliners, exasperated from repetitive, negative news. The girls parked by the curb of a house whose owners they didn’t know, made sure the lights were out at Nicholas’ family’s house next door, grabbed rolls of toilet paper, and draped the pin oaks in front, the holly that flanked the corner of the house, and the azaleas in the landscaping. Some of them giggled while others shushed them.

            Like adult burglars, they piled into the same vehicles and drove to the next house of a boy they all liked, but who also ignored them, and repeated the toilet paper escapade. They papered a third yard before calling it a night.  The three targets–Nicholas, Martin, and Clay—never had a clue anything was happening outside their windows. They wore headphones and were yelling at their friends who were all played a game on the X-box.

            It wasn’t until dawn that any of the boys’ parents realized their yards were draped in toilet paper. The drizzle started about three in the morning and made for quite a mess when neighbors, out for an early stroll with dogs, saw, shook their heads, and were thankful it wasn’t them who had to clean it up.

            Annoyed more than angry, the parents woke and told their boys what their friends had done, but they had no idea it was sweet girls from their class who had silent crushes on the boys.  Some of the mothers, though, knew what their daughters had done. They had the Life 360 app on their phones and tracked the whereabouts of their daughters. Two of the mothers noted where they had been at ten at night and confronted them.

            “We were watching Hallmark movies, drinking hot chocolate, and eating sugar cookies,” one daughter lied to her parents. She lost her phone and car keys for a week. The other daughter confessed what the friends had done, but the parents told her to avoid that sort of thing in the future, that it was illegal, that if they were caught, it could affect their college admissions.  Plus, the parents had done it themselves in a time when the only app was nosey neighbors who called parents to tell.

Maya Detwiller is a recent graduate of Lafayette College with Mechanical Engineering degree and an English minor.

My Favorite Things

My favorite thing that happens on the street is when a woman walks by and I smell the perfume she leaves behind. I am with her in the morning when her hair was still warm from her blow dryer and her cheek was still crossed by pillowcase folds. She pulls on fabulous clothes in the perfect order, cuffs, tucks, then untucks, and adds vanilla to the insides of her wrists. I want to run after her. I want to ask her for coffee so I can sit in her scent a little longer and ask her who was the first person she knew by their smell. It was her grandmother, who always smelled like the champagne colored bottle from her dresser. The glass had yellow, pink, and green flowers.

My favorite thing that happens in the subway is when the lights on the train flicker. I picture the car grinding to a stop and the lights going out. I would scream and grab the arm of the man who sat next to me. We would make breathy, nervous jokes to one another until the firemen let us out and we would walk through the long, dirty tunnel to the light of the last platform we passed. People would pull us up and over the ledge and we would go in different directions smile and we’d never see each other again.

My favorite thing that happens in my hometown is when I get to drive again. It is usually night and I can make the radio loud and feel the cold leather seats sap my body heat while I shoot through the hills. The people turn into lights and I don’t have to tell anyone a thing about me.

Bethany Bruno is a born and raised Florida Writer. She attended Flagler College, in St. Augustine, FL, where she earned her B.A in English. She was first published in the Flagler Review. She later attended the University of North Florida for her M.A. Before becoming a Library Specialist, she was an English Teacher and a Park Ranger with the National Park Service. She’s working on her debut novel, “From the Passenger Seat.” She lives in Port Saint Lucie, FL.

Food Stamp Anxiety

Pulling into the Walgreen’s parking lot, my senses heighten and I can feel a sense of regret. I shouldn’t be doing this, especially after all the hard work I put into the gym the last week. But, I feel like shit today and just want to eat ice cream and drink my drug of choice, Diet Pepsi. I’m sick of everyone telling me to get off the stuff. I know it’s not the healthiest drink but it’s better than alcohol. Drug addicts, alcoholics, and failures in all aspects of life exist in my circle of friends, yet I’m a fatty who likes diet soda way too much and needs to stop. Clearly, I have the problem.

My beat up tiny silver Nissan shuts off as I slide out of the driver’s seat and begin my walk toward the automatic doors. I’m dressed in my typical lazy attire- oversized hoodie, loose dress that comes down toward my knees, and thong flip flops. Some might say I’ve overdressed myself for only going to the store but the reality is I just find it easier to slip a dress over my head than having to find shorts and shirt that hides my round stomach. I’m not pregnant, by the way. The Scott family just happens to gain all of our weight in the belly region. Everywhere else is well proportioned, luckily. But the one nuisance is that I constantly have to tell people that I am, in fact, not pregnant and just fat. During last week’s failed job interview the assistant manager asked “Do you have any future happenings that would inhibit you from working?” all while staring at my stomach. I just smiled and said no, and tried to remember to suck in my stomach for the remainder of the interview. I didn’t get the job or even a call back letting me know that they had offered the position to someone else. A crappy hotel on the outskirts of town wouldn’t hire me, a college graduate with a friendly personality because I might be “indisposed” in a few months. This was the first of many times I’ve been asked something along the lines of “when are you do?” all while placing a hand on my belly. The answer is always the same – “Not a baby, just fat”… “Oh…” and away they go. The worst time this happened was when I worked at Old Navy. A woman asked me to get onto a ladder to check for a shoe in a bigger size. As I began to climb she grabbed my wrist in terror and said “Oh honey, you shouldn’t be doing that in your condition!” At the time, I had no freaking idea what she was talking about. I told her I was fine and went back to climbing. “But what if you fall?! Think about the child.” It felt like a slap in the face- in fact my entire face became red with embarrassment. I was so shocked that I could only let out a small breath of “but I’m not …pregnant. What?” She too gave me the typical response of “oh…” and walked away. So word of advice to everyone out there: never ever congratulate someone on being pregnant because you just never know. Unless they specifically tell you they are indeed pregnant, and then respond. Even if they have a belly sticking out the size of a watermelon, I would not say shit until they bring it up. It will save you and that person awkward embarrassment just in case you’re wrong.

Ding-Ding! Alerts all to my arrival as I enter the store. Markdowns and tiny shopping carts block the entrance as I move past it all. I anxiously walk down the rows of aisles and finally reach my destination. I pick up a twelve pack of diet soda and to my surprise the Cowbell cherry vanilla ice cream that I’ve loved since a kid is on sale. I grab a carton and begin to walk back towards the front counter. I walk past the sales clerk, an older woman with cat eyeglasses, as she is in the candy aisle helping another customer. I stop at the counter and unload my supplies. I really need to get the hell out of here. I need to hurry up and buy this so no one can see my food stamps card. I know the card shouldn’t be used for luxuries like soda and ice cream, but if everyone else can do it than so can I, right? Sure enough, a little girl and her mom pull up to the counter with their basket.

“Where’d she go?” she stammers at me. “She’s around the corner helping someone” I say, trying not to make eye contact with either one of them. Now my anxiety is really starting to build up inside. Maybe I should just leave the stuff, I don’t need it anyway! Maybe this is a sign from God that I shouldn’t break my diet. An older couple comes up behind the mother. “Can we go ahead of y’all? We just need to buy his batteries.” The mother nods and waves them right up next to me. The old woman is so close to me that she can see everything that’s in my purse, which isn’t much. If I took a step back, I’d step on her toes. Fuck this I’m… and now here she comes. She waddles up toward the register and apologizes. As she begins to scan my soda the little girl says “COW BELL ICE CREAM….” I look down at her, “You know many people died from that, right?”

A million emotions and thoughts go through my head. Should I be a smartass and say I’m counting on it? Or slap her and yell at the mother for raising such a rude little brat. Or just walk out crying? No, I don’t do any of these. Instead I just say “Okay” as the others just laugh. I don’t know if their laughing at me or the little girl, but I’ve had enough. As I slide the food stamps card through the machine, it freezes. The cashier clearly has no idea what she’s doing and just asks me to swipe it again. The pressure to get out of the store is so high that I think I might break and just leave everything. I can see the older woman behind me as she looks at her husband with a “you’ve got to be kidding me” kind of look. I drop the card and bend down to pick up just as the APPROVED writing appears. I’ve never been so relived, and I feel like I just broke through a brick wall that had been stacking all around me. I grab my bag and soda case and half smiled as I walk toward the exit. I don’t look back in fear of what could be said about me.

Next time, I’ll go to Wally World.

Ding- Ding!

Tyler is a journalist from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who holds a Bachelor’s of Arts in English from Penn State University, and is trying to rekindle that creative fire news writing beat out of him.

The Worst Sound

There’s an unforgettable sound that precedes death—recognizable as the scratchy gasp from a grandparent or pained whine from a family pet seconds before they leave our world for the next.

As a boy I had grown tired of death. Even then, at such a young age as I was, grief gave way to anger at the loss of a life I adored. Once I stared at a faux candlestick behind my mother’s patterned curtains. Through them the light appeared muffled, dim. When finally I unplugged the plastic flame, it slowly faded into nothingness like the dog’s eyes when he arched his back, kicked out his feet, and howled one last time earlier that night.

It was a sad episode for my family, but I imagine it must be sadder for he who caused it. That’s why I decided to meet him: Death; ask why he would turn off someone’s lights when people loved them; and why he would make them make such a terrible sound.

I had it in my mind to wait under my grandmother’s bed each night after she grew sick and forgetful, and came to live in our spare room.

The cold room.

I wasn’t supposed to be in there, I was warned, but I had some words for this fellow hurting me, hurting everyone, everywhere in the world.

When late one night he cracked her door and silently glided through, I slithered from beneath the bed. He stopped and stared (probably), I wasn’t sure since he was faceless.

He heaved a sharp finger at me, “You… think it… fun?” the voice sloughed from somewhere beneath that black hood.

I froze, unable to remember the speech I had prepared to skewer him with.

“Why?” was all I managed.

He stood unmoving for what seemed like minutes. I was unsure if he heard me, or even understood with how he turned his gaping black hole sideways when I spoke, as if pushing an ear he didn’t have toward me to better understand. It was what my dad did when he practiced French with his drinking friends.

“You… don’t understand. Cannot.”

His arm waved toward my grandmother with a rattle of bones and he floated away. His lanky shoulders drooped.

And she didn’t gasp when she died.

She chimed.

What an odd sound. It sounded exactly like the wind chimes that hovered above our English Ivy on the porch.

Death did me a favor.

Although all the years after, and still, I remember my grandmother’s death, and that hazy interaction with Death, whenever I pass a house and the wind stirs the chimes.

J. Motoki is a nomadic librarian who writes in the stacks, snubs patrons, and whispers uncomfortable things from the shadows. Her work have been published in Nowhere.Ink, Rune Bear, and Coffin Bell. You can read more of her work at www.jumotki.com.

Daily Tally

Closing shift. I’m not feeling myself tonight. My sweaty hand clutches a brass tally counter, a relic from the card catalogue days, and the click, click, clicking sets my teeth on edge. (Internet Search: What is fever of the hands?) Thirty minutes until closing and patrons still swarm through the doors.

All these people returning books at night, tossing them down the book drop, one by one. Flutter of page wings. All these people stamping up the stairs to gawk at the domed glass ceiling, stars trapped in foggy reflection. Look at their necks, slender tendons on sticks, look how vulnerable. Remember when we thought turkeys stare skyward and drown in rain?

You ask: will these glass walls last the end times?

Asking the real questions.

My desk in the corner reads REFERENCE. An invitation to stupid inquiry.  If you ask for restroom directions, I’ll point you down the only hall and watch you come back, confused. Internet trouble? Clicking the red X will NOT expand new tabs. ILLs take a minimum of five to ten business days, I’m sorry you need this specific book for your research paper that’s due tomorrow. No, I don’t know why you forgot to breathe the other day, ask your general practitioner. Better yet, say nothing until the time comes when you forget again, until you start to inhale again. Trigger lung collapse, your face bruised and crumpling like old fruit.

After break, an elderly lady smiles knowingly as I rub my bloated stomach. Boy or girl?

It is, in fact, pies.

Little boy: Coffin bells, how do they ring if there’s no one around to ring them?

The Victorian paradox; that pall riddle. I search the question, our interests piqued. See, the string is tied to the deceased’s finger―if they wake, they ring the bells. Little boy, hands over his mouth, the world’s biggest secret revealed only to him, he is going to laugh or scream.

Attention guests: the library will be closing in—

Down the hall these turkeys go, and I hear a woman cluck to her friend: it was so strange, like I forgot to know how to breathe.   

A former professor of art history who has lived many years in several countries, Julia Ballerini is now settled in Manhattan where she is devoted full time to writing fiction. Several of her stories have been published in print and online.

Painless

         The dog was licking her face. A furry black dog. It was dark. How long had she been lying on the pavement? It had been daylight when she fell. That she remembers. She crawled over cobblestones and gravel, the dog ahead, barking. That she remembers. Then whiteness. Space of no memories. Ambulence. Her mother bending over her. Can you hear me, hear me, hear me!

         Was it the next day that someone brought her two orange fish in a round bowl? She remembers them swimming in and out of her mind’s whiteness as she lay cranked to a tilt on a bed as white as her mind. Watery black eyes stared, slithery mouths gulped open. Did she scream? The orange fish were soon disappeared.

≈

         Her mother was folding clothes into a suitcase, a suitcase that smelled of newness. She was fourteen and being packed away to boarding school, disappeared like the gulping goldfish. It was then, seven years after the fall, that her mother, smoothing a new blue sweater into a new brown valise––it was then that her mother said, stop crying, you’re lucky to be alive, you almost died in that accident.

≈

         Now she watches her own child scrambling up a slide in the playground holding tight its silvery edges. She has a startling memory of having not having held on to the rusty rails of that long-ago fire escape, of having leaned into the fall, of having given herself up to it. Not because of a will to die, but because of an absence of a will to live.

         She closes her eyes trying to conjur a memory of pain. The pain immediately after the fall or the pain that must have sliced its way through the drugs in the hospital. Nothing. Her breath comes in and out of her lungs, her belly expands and subsides, but she can’t remember the pain, only the horror of the staring, gulping fish.

         Back home from the playground, her little girl tucked safely in bed, she goes to the computer. She types: memory and pain. Site after site is about the short-term memory of pain, not the long-term forgetting of it. The newsletter of the International Association for the Study of Pain is no help.

         Yet the search has its rewards. She learns about nerves that carry pain signals to the spinal cord and brain to excite the cells that make memories of pain––a cellular excitation that produces an hightened reactivity to pain that can last for months. Her cells must have been revved up, excited, sensitive to a pain she can no longer recall.

         “Excite” a technical term. Yes, but she pictures a nervy little creature bringing a message of pain to a nebbish looking cell.

         “Yo man, belly just sliced open like a sausage. Blood spurting everywhere. What a scene! Hurts like hell.”

         “Wow! Cool. Tell me more. Hold on, lemmy grab a pencil and paper.”

         She learns about molecules called ERKs­––extracellular signal-related kinases––that can change the memory of cells in the spinal cord and brain. Molecular psycotherapy! She reads up on the marine snail Aplysia that is very attractive to neurobiologists because of large brain cells that are up to one millimeter in diameter. One millimeter! What is the size of a human brain cell? She hasn’t a clue. She logs out, shuts down her computer.

         She calls her friend Richard whose store of knowledge is phenomenal and who was once married to a doctor. “Memory is not intended to be an archive,” he tells her. “We have an automatic extinguishing mechanism that remembers having the pain but not the pain itself. Otherwise we could not go on.” That makes sense. Except for certain phobias and an intense dislike of oatmeal Richard usually makes sense.

         It is reassuring to know that, even if her brain cells turn out to be smaller than those of a mollusk, her pain extinguishing mechanism is working in full force.

         Tomorrow she and her daughter will make up a story about a brainy snail named Aplysia. A snail who feels no pain. A joyous snail with a will to live.

Daniel de Culla is a writer, poet, and photographer. He’s member of the Spanish Writers Association, Earthly Writers International Caucus, Poets of the World, (IA) International Authors, Surrealism Art, and others. Director of Gallo Tricolor Review, and Robespierre Review. He participated in many Festivals of Poetry, and Theater in Madrid, Burgos, Berlin, Minden, Hannover and Genève .He has exposed in many galleries from Madrid, Burgos, London, and Amsterdam. He is moving between North Hollywood, Madrid and Burgos.

NIGHT MUSIC THAT DOES NOT SHUT UP

With good or bad music comes Night
When the Sun is below the horizon.
Black cloak as clerical cassock
It’s covering the city
On their roofs of houses and blocks
Referring to Mozart’s music
To Strau’s waltzes
To rock or rap.
The Moon flies over the clouds
With his head peeled and a scarf around her neck.
Little by little, night is singing its music
That does not shut up
In harmony or melody of sounds
Or both combined
And, when it’s quiet, butterflies leave the clouds
And come towards the light to burn their wings
Introducing more or less deeply
In the lovers’ bedroom
With vain talk, stories, gossip
Where one organ enters the parts of another
Adhering to its surface
Like the cat at the snout very thin
The very long tail
And the very gray hairs of the mouse.
Mischiefs, traps, perfidies
Coronate musical notes
From a nocturnal dream that soon begins.
Stigmas, infamous notes, like Bingo’s cards
Are coming out of a sack, from an urn
Or of any other similar deposit.
Tokens, balls or any other similar objects
With the names of the people
That they have to leave with luck.
Later, to the point, Dream
With its sad or gentle serenade
Between handfuls of cotton
Jumps without rhyme or reason
In corners and between sheets
When networks are building
For unsuspecting flies to produce sounds
On string instruments, wind instruments
Percussion, keys, and so on
That makes them boast of themselves
Making march to the melodious Night
At its dawn
With music elsewhere.
-Daniel de Culla

Christian Bot is a happily disgruntled writer from Ontario, Canada with a passion for poetry, short fiction, and essays (all while juggling two jobs.) A graduate of the University of Western Ontario’s history program, much of his work contains historical and philosophical themes. He has been published in The London Free Press, southwestern Ontario’s leading daily newspaper, and Areo magazine.

I awoke one morning inexplicably consumed by a rather curious obsession. I desired to become a nude model for art classes at the local university. I paid little attention to the origins of this desire, insofar as there can be said to have been any beyond the vague suggestions of a dream. I cared only to fulfill my new ambition. I craved to bare all in a manifesto of contempt for the tyranny of clothes. I wished only to be free, and openly so, feeling the exhilaration of a lion released from the zoo and left to roam at will. I fantasized the crisp air of the air conditioner breathing on my flesh unhindered by stifling raiment. I longed to return to the state of nature that triumphed before Adam’s fall.

To that end, I snatched my laptop from the jungle of clutter in my bedroom and visited the university’s online job board. I was not yet finished scanning the first page when I struck the coveted gold vein, encountering this listing: “Now hiring: art models, male. For nude posing in undergraduate art classes. Must be willing to shave most body air. Part-time, $35/hour.” My good luck left me euphoric, perhaps more elated than some people will ever be. I began to fill out the application without a picosecond’s hesitation. I scarcely even questioned the demand of a topless photo, presumably to verify the metrics of my anatomy. Several more mundane fields followed, and my application was complete in fifteen breezing minutes. I celebrated with a banana milkshake (enhanced with whey powder, obviously) as I treated my hulking biceps to a tender, Mediterranean kiss and pounded on my pectoralis major with all the vigor of a certain colossal Hollywood ape.

The call for an interview came three days later. I dressed for the occasion in a semi-formal uniform consisting of a white dress shirt, deliberately and unmistakably tight, a tie, and black dress pants. I was met in the inner sanctum of the department of visual arts by a dour-faced gentleman of about sixty. His hair was ghastly white, having long since neutered its last remaining trace of gray, and parted at the middle. His face, hardly less pallid, bore a pair of wide-rimmed glasses. His appearance and demeanor attested to a disgruntled, sexually frustrated bachelor whose last recourse was to the tedium of academia. I found his pessimism a tad intimidating, but I was able to resist the full force of his powers. Externally, at least, my virulent optimism was not dented in the least.

“This way, please,” intoned the professor with a clear motioning gesture. When we were both seated, he began to read from a prearranged list, as if he were stammering through an early rehearsal of a Realist play. “This position involves posing nude. Are you comfortable with that?”

“I find nudity quite liberating,” I confessed, really quite unembarrassed about my distaste for clothes.

“Good,” the professor murmured more or less nonchalantly, so fixated on his formulaic script that he seemed unbothered by my bohemianism. “Now you may have to work with female models, also nude of course. Is this something you can handle?”

“There’s little that I’d find more delightful,” I beamed, still shamelessly risqué in my responses.

“I don’t doubt that,” the professor quipped, jolting his head back up at me and breaking the spell that the script had cast upon him. “But the fact of the matter is that the students deserve to focus on the contours of your shoulders rather than the girth of your erect penis. If you find a dangling pair of breasts so titillating that you can’t focus on your work, there’s no point in having you here.”

I had to suppress a laugh at the professor’s stunning bluntness. More to the point, his honesty filled me with appreciation for him. He was right, of course, but I was not prepared to let his manifest rightness dampen my ambition. As the infant inklings of amusement marked my face, I replied, “I admit it, sir. I’m just as lustful as the last man you’ve interviewed and the ones you’ll interview after me. I’m weak against the allure of naked women, and I won’t bother to deny it. But you see, that’s not why I want this job. I want the liberty of unencumbered skin. I want to feel freer than I’ve ever felt before. It’s emancipation, not copulation that inspires me.”

My words left an indelible impression on the professor. He was frankly startled by my honesty, but still more impressed by the purity of my ambition. It was apparent that he had seldom come across an applicant encouraged not by the allure of money or the pleasures of women, but by the thrill of nudity itself. “That’s something I’d really like to hear more often,” he confessed, and as we stood up to shake hands in parting, he endeavored to conclude the matter quickly and offered me the position on the spot. I accepted unhesitatingly, and was promised shifts beginning in a week. As I departed, I shot the professor a jovial smile, supremely satisfied that my sudden but genuine impulse would soon yield a rewarding harvest.