Scene 001
Ordinary Life
Silas Rivers kept office hours on Tuesdays because nobody was in the building after two o’clock on Tuesdays.
Silas preferred the quiet. It was easier to follow the rules that way.
He sat with the door open while he graded structural models with a dying red pen. His father’s pen. Silas kept refilling the barrel because new ones felt like betrayal in his hand.
Silas graded papers until a soft knock pulled him back to reality.
In the door stood a student holding a worksheet full of his red ink.
“Professor Rivers? I failed the load calculation. I don’t understand how.”
“Sit,” Silas said, motioning to the chair in the corner of his small office.
She sat, handing him the paper.
Silas turned the paper toward himself. He found the error in four seconds, but he continued to stare, taking the time to choose his words carefully.
“You didn’t fail,” he stated in a metered voice. “You solved the wrong problem correctly.”
She blinked at him, furrowing her brow. Silas sighed and looked at the page again.
“You assumed a fixed support here.” He tapped the page. “It’s a pin. The building moves. Everything moves, given enough weight and enough time. You have to design for that, not against it.”
The student scribbled his words as quickly as Silas said them, circling them at the end.
Silas held his breath as he realized the sentence had come out sideways. He had been doing that more and more, saying ordinary things and feeling another voice underneath it, waiting its turn.
The student left nine minutes later, confused but satisfied with the explanation. Silas sat holding the red pen and the stack of papers, but he didn’t start grading again.
His mind wandered to an unfinished manuscript on his laptop at home. He had written a woman without a face again. He had written faceless characters before and it had never bothered him, but this one lived in his head.
Silas shook his head as he capped the pen, looking out the window. He watched the campus lights come on one row at a time.
The gentle glow of the computer monitor woke Lavender at two a.m. She had fallen asleep at her desk again. As she sat up, her neck ached and she moved slower. Her sister called this a problem, Lavender called it semantics.
After easing herself up little by little, she stood and stretched as she paced the map room. She found herself standing in front of the far wall, staring at the maps that covered it.
Coastlines with alternate shores were annotated in the margins. The edges were pinned with postcards from around the world that were sent by her friends and family traveling abroad, except one. The postcards were from places like Jordan, Italy, France, and Spain.
Except one.
Its location didn't exist, the postmark was unknown, and it was unsigned.
Lavender stared at it before turning back to her desk, picking up her phone.
There were always missed messages waiting when she remembered to look.
She read the usual thread from her editor, how’s the draft, we need something by Friday, and she typed back the standard response: good, almost there because it was easier than the truth. She didn’t feel like she was writing this draft this time. She felt like she was translating it.
She looked back at the wall of places that were and weren’t.
“Where did you come from?” she said out loud to no one.
She sat back down and kept writing, because sitting still with that question wasn’t an option.
