Lizzie drags a side chair into the closet. She tests the chair’s stability, steps up. It brings her to eye level with the shelf supporting packets plus photo albums, side by side. Lizzie peruses the row of photo albums, their irregular shapes and spines. She decides to push these volumes aside for some reason, peering into the remote closet dark. She notes that an errant packet has been placed, not along with the nominally organized packet archive, but behind the albums. And this rogue packet seems to have been conveyed to its current resting place in haste, if not anger. Lizzie takes hold of it, descends. She drops down into her mother’s wicker desk chair to read.

This packet isn’t a packet from Marta’s class, and it isn’t even a poetry packet. It’s a packet from a fiction workshop taught this semester by a visiting instructor. The visiting instructor is youngish—though, when Lizzie pauses to think about it, not really so, so young. The visitor has an air of arrested development, favors bright dresses. Her yellow hair is cut into a bob.

Internally, Lizzie sneers. There is a parrot on the cover of the visitor’s first novel, a meandering parable regarding an adorable postmodern stowaway. It’s a book for nerds. Lizzie has been forced to attend related events. Publicly, at least, the Hillarys move en famille.

Lizzie attempts, with middling success, to force the aberrant rage she feels into her stomach.

She is looking at the story. The story is titled “The Origin of the World.” It’s by someone named Clare Elwil. Because Marta, strictly speaking, does not pay much attention to what occurs on the fiction side of things, Lizzie decides she will read it. Marta has gone so far as to circle the story’s title, penciling in a cryptic note:

The hinge of writing allows the author to connect her two unknowns. We see in both worlds.

Forty-Two. Recognition

Forty-Two

Recognition

Workshop is over, and Clare is alone in her room. She experiences what has transpired as a shifting pool of ease, a gentle affective estuary. The room has few hard edges. Even austerity is a pleasure. Downtown, a siren wails.

They read her story. The class did. She does not want to characterize this event, but it has not gone poorly. It was, at any rate, an event. Things are different.

Clare thinks about the game she has played with herself. She has told herself that she is not the one writing. She has given herself permission not to write. She might be anyone; who cares who is doing the writing. And yet, they praised her—and they have praised her unique style, her surprising lack of compromise.