Sighing, Marianne let the woman enter. She sat down on the sofa and reached in a practiced way for the Kleenex, like someone used to being consoled in other people’s offices. She had an incoherent story about a woman in her workshop whose husband had two mail-order wives, and somehow this connected to her desire to be transferred to another poetry class. There was no other poetry class.

“So your problem is with … polygamy?” Marianne guessed. She stood behind her desk, packing applications for the next round of students into her tote bag.

No, the woman said: it wasn’t that. The content of the writing, she explained between tissues.

“She’s writing about polygamy?”

“My writing,” she insisted, sitting up straighter. “My writing connects to things in her life. Powerful, terrible things. I think God has brought me here for a reason.”

Marianne had heard versions of this search for meaning in randomness all day long: God brought me here for this reason or that reason, to battle with my peers or teach my professor about the finer points of Habakkuk. But this woman had no conflict; she’d just come here to share. Ruth had a similar story about the first time she met Darryl at a youth group gathering, and Marianne had tried her sisterly best only to listen, not judge, as Ruth went on and on about the divinely inspired nature of their meeting. Why couldn’t people see that it was unreasonable—arrogant, even—to picture a god placing them on Earth like chess pieces? Why couldn’t they see that the connections they made were very highly correlated to their personal, individual, deeply insignificant and often foolish choices?

“That’s a lot of folders. Student work?”

“What?” Marianne said. She looked down at her tote, now stuffed to overflowing with paper. “No, just applications. Many, many applications.”

“For next year?”

“For next round,” Marianne said. “Two hundred so far, just in poetry.”

“That’s incredible—so few of us are chosen,” said the woman. She sounded awed and pleased. “You read them all?”

“Yes,” said Marianne. She wanted to cry, looking at the papers and thinking about their probable contents. “I should just close my eyes and reach in, like a card trick.” She demonstrated, reaching in and pulling out a submission bound in a cumbersome plastic claw binding. With a flourish, she held it up as two other packets fell to the floor. “Ta-da!”

The woman picked up the two manuscripts that had fallen to her feet and set them carefully on Marianne’s desk.

“Not that that’s what we do,” Marianne added quickly, gathering the submissions and putting them back in her bag. “We have a very rigorous selection process.”