me without any tenderness and said, “Take no for an answer. Her experiment is over.” I could smell the deep soapy center of your still wet braid and stood there with panting nostrils. “If you’re reasonable about it, and you get back to your own, unobjectionable little project, some other institution may accept you again somewhere, someday.”
The scrambled egg bits were now assembled in a little mound in the center of my palm. My nails were white and clean again. I wanted to believe that someone would pardon me. I didn’t think five years could shatter into glass shards. It’d be easy enough to complete my nearly complete thesis. But no matter what you’re working on, there comes a time when you realize your work isn’t worth doing. In my case, that time was Rachel’s untimeliness.
I knew from the melody of the way you’d said “someday” that you had nothing more to say. I rose to find a trash can, you rose to dismiss me before I could leave, I left before I could find the trash.
I have always stood outside your office door for a long time after I close it. You must hear the pause between the latch and my steps. I stand at your door and your name plaque hits exactly eye level. JOAN in my left eye, then my invisible nose, then KALLAS in the right, in white block letters that are etched into fake wood and full of dust. Sometimes I clean a little dust out. Sometimes I blow. The portion of your life I estimate I take up on any given day has been the size of my pride. Hugely variable.
Your husband, unbuttoned to the nipples, stood chatting a sophomore when I got out onto the quad. I walked right up to them and flicked the eggs into the can beside the girl. I nodded to Barry but he didn’t want to acknowledge me, lest he offend her. He curbs his natural mess via some kind of “one at a time” rationing I see his entire flesh struggling to uphold. Would he have acknowledged you? Of course. The sophomores know about you, Barry’s better half, so much better. He’d be lessening himself to distance himself from you in any way. He does know that, to his credit.
“Why Mr. Estlin,” I said, sticking a wooden spoon into his seduction, “what fine autumn weather. Unbutton your shirt once deeper and admit the entire breeze.”
“Nell.”
He thrust one chest hair and a low button into the wrong hole.
“I’m Catherine,” said the sophomore. To my delight, she shook my hand.
I left him to his bad hobby. The campus is raw and at its neat best in September. I’m disgraced Joan but also outraged. Now that the shock is wearing down, I can begin to mourn that this bully of a Parthenon is no longer open to me. As I walked past the library, Tom went flying up its stairs. He didn’t see me and I didn’t call out to him, though it would have been a tonic to stare at the eternal and reliable mole on his neck. Your class tomorrow would have been the first we’ve seen of each other since our split. He doesn’t know that I won’t be there. He’ll sit next to Mishti, your two blithe out-of-department guests, their host missing.
Home now, I open to aconite. The venom Cerberus spat at Hercules as the hero dragged the beast out of Hades. Wolf poison. A genus of nearly three hundred species of flowering plants, most grow in mountain meadows, most have the power to asphyxiate. I want to begin with the blue-flowering variety because it is the quickest to close the throat.
MONKSHOOD
Two priests died in Dingwall in 1856 when the cook grated monkshood root into the evening stew, mistaking it for horseradish. I’ve been gathering legends of Aconitum, monkshood’s parent toxin, and they pop up everywhere. In Shasekishu, in Shakespeare, in Medea. In the funny little pamphlet on your windowsill from the British Homeopathic Association. Hapless thirteenth-century Japanese servants mistake dried aconite root for sugar and almost, but do not, die of it. Henry IV imagines the poison as blood mingled “with venom of suggestion.” Medea fails to poison Theseus with aconite-tipped wine. Athena, armed with aconite, transforms Arachne into a spider. The moon goddess Hecate invents aconite one night in her garden. She wants it both for poisoning her enemies and for boiling into teas for teething or feverish children. She extracts it from the