Thread: English 2352 {DearestDarling & Dane Stalling}

Isobel was asleep when Luke got home. He put the toilet paper in the cupboard, capers on the counter. Did you refrigerate the damn things? He didn't want to squint at the bottle to find out. Yeast on top of the capers. Isobel would find a way to be upset about that, and he found that he didn't care. There was a curious freedom when you were seriously fucked. He stripped out of his clothes and washed his face in the bathroom. The water felt good, and he drank some out of his hand. The tiniest hint of strawberry slipped across his tongue and was gone. He looked at himself in the mirror, the buzz from the beer a barely perceptible numbness. His pupils seemed too large, and he didn't recognize the look on his own face. He looked happy and terrified, like the face of a child just after his first successful wobbly bike ride. He snapped off the light, turned his phone on silent and slipped into bed. He dreamed about rolling off cliffs, the edges of roller coasters, leaning over the railings at the tops of skyscrapers, tumbling backwards off waterfalls. ---- ...a break? What the hell does that mean, anyway? Adults don't just disappear for no reason and go to strip clubs for a 'break.' That's what junkies do, gambling addicts, alcoholics, perverts, and men who are having their pathetic mid-life crisis trophy tramp affairs. A fucking break . Isobel could apply makeup, do her hair, get dressed, and maintain a steady, scathing monologue all at once. It wasn't a strip club. It was a bar. I got a few drinks, listened to the band, got a cup of coffee, came home. Luke was trying ties against his shirt. Nothing matched. And you found time to cross a picket line and steal food out of the mouths of hard-working people. Isobel glared at him. Just wear the tie from yesterday. that one matches. Luke pulled the shirt off and picked another one. I'm going to be late. Look, if you want a break, call Josh and do Play Station in his man-cave or whatever. Don't just go out for capers and disappear for four hours. She whirled out the front door and the silence that descended was deafening. ---- Luke slipped his keys into his pocket and picked up his phone, turned the ringer back on. He had a message from a number he didn't recognize. He hit the button. Rosalie in his tie, and very little else. His face got hot and he sat down on the bed. Holy shit, this had been on his phone since 245 in the morning. He adjusted himself in his pants absently. She was going to give him a heart attack. The picture couldn't have been more seductive if she had been naked. Her hair fell across her face, and he touched the screen where her hands held his tie. The one that matched. I have no need for good souls an accomplice is what I wanted. Appealing sexually, appealing intellectually. How many educators had been destroyed by just this kind of girl? What was she thinking? She liked to tease, but this seemed risky beyond what few limits she seemed to have. He pulled the card out of his phone, transferred the image to his computer, and encrypted the file. He deleted the image and the text from his phone, but saved the number in his contacts under The Band. ---- His Tuesday classes went slowly, and every time he thought about the image, he had to sit down behind his desk. He sat most of the day. He hated PowerPoint, but a darkened classroom would have been more comfortable, and he wished, for the first time, that he had made slides. ---- Wednesday morning Luke walked into class a little late and Rosalie was there, her treasures scattered around her. She looked stunning, the bulk of her boots made her legs look that much more shapely, and there was a lot of leg to see. The tie was around her neck, and every detail of her outfit was a tease of some sort. It made Luke grin. He set up his computer, plugged in the cable. Jack, can you hit the lights? I've got slides. The first slide came up, simple, Point of View white on black. Okay, I know this is review for some of you, but narrative point of view will tell you a lot about the piece you're reading. What is the role of the character, the author, and even the reader in the experience of the art. Take Thurber's Secret Life of Walter Mitty . The short story is a very close third person omniscient narrator. We're right inside his head, seeing his fantasies as vividly as he does. In Snows , it's the same. Some authors like Nabokov use first person because there's not another way to tell certain stories. So, for those of you who enjoy your social media, first person is like a selfie. A slide of a girl making duck face, her arm blurring into the foreground. The story is told almost like she's telling it herself. There are variations- epistolary first person is like being able to see the phone, like this. The picture changed to a girl taking a picture of herself in a mirror, the phone in plain view. These narrative decisions say something about the content, about who knows what, about what entities are present. In the first, there is just the girl and the audiencethe boyfriend she's sending the picture to. In the second, the girl is looking at herself and sending it to her boyfriend, so she is not only the subject, but also a recorder and observer. Now take a look at these and tell me what you notice about them. A sequence of images flashed on the screen, one second per slide of various candid and innocent pictures of girls in their bedrooms. The last one was Rosalie. It flashed on the screen and off again quickly, replaced by another Point of View slide, a white box mostly obscuring an enlargement of Rosalie's photograph. If you didn't know what it was, you wouldn't see it, but it was there on screen, Rosalie's hair the backdrop to her hand holding his tie at the edge of the screen. Anyone? A girl in the second row raised her hand. Yes- what's different about that last set of pictures? They're not selfies, she said, her glasses reflecting the screen in the dark. Go on. The people in those pictures had someone else in the room taking the pictures for them. Luke walked across the front of the classroom, his eyes on the picture and stopped in front of Rosalie, his eyes on the screen. There's someone else in the room taking pictures for them. Yes. Those are generally higher quality portraits, aren't they, and they require a level of trust. He sat behind the desk and leaned back in his chair. Let's discuss what these things could mean. Jack, hit the lights.