It was hard to explain that the room itself, along with the application, seemed to be interfering with her writing, with the hand of God that had once guided her poems. It was embarrassing to think about one of her neighbors seeing her in the act of writing—though imagining some professor at the school reading the twelve short poems she’d enclosed with her application was not any easier.

“I want to be around other poets,” Janine had tried to explain.

“Oh,” he’d said, and she could tell that he was a little hurt.

“Also, I want a teacher. Someone to help me make the poems better,” she’d said, though it was hard to imagine how one went about changing a poem.

“Okay,” Rick had said, kissing her forehead. He took his lunch from the counter—three ham and cheese sandwiches and an apple in a paper sack—and left for work, same as always. Janine followed him to the door and watched him haul his heavy frame into the cab of his truck, adjust the mirror, and wave good-bye.

“Will you be home early, if the storm comes?” she’d called after him.

He’d ducked his head out of the window and looked up at the tranquil sky. “It won’t storm today,” he’d told her. He did not seem to be thinking anymore about the school. That was the thing about Rick: he never held on to emotions for long.

Perhaps if the room had not been glass, she thought now. Because he had nothing to hide, Rick believed in absolute transparency. None of the bedroom doors in their house locked, and Rick and Janine had shared the same email account for more than ten years. How could she explain that poems needed privacy? That it would have been better for her if he’d simply cleared out a closet?

Janine checked her application folder one last time, then closed and relocked the drawer. It was likely she wouldn’t get in anyway. What did she know about poetry? And who cared anymore about her subject, poor Terri Schiavo, who’d starved to death years ago?

Marianne turned over the manuscript in her lap—yet another end-times piece—and thought of Ruth, who’d once confessed to reading the first of the Left Behind books. “Did you like it?” Marianne had asked, trying not to let her alarm show.