The Student

She never spoke, which made her obvious, the way death makes the air obvious in an empty chair, the way sky compressed between bare branches is more gray or blue, the way a window is more apparent than a wall. She held her silence to her breast like a worn coat, smoke, an armful of roses. Her silence colored the smaller silences that came and went, that other students stood up and filled in. I leaned near the window in my office. She sat on the edge of a chair. Hips rigid, fidgeting while I made my little speech. February light pressed its cold back against the glass, sealing us in. She focused on my lips as I spoke, as if to study how it's done, the sheer mechanics of it: orchestration of jaw and tongue, teeth shifting in tandem, shaping the air. So I stopped, let her silence drift over us, let it sift in like smoke or snow, let its petals settle on my shoulders. I looked outside to the branches of a stripped tree, winter starlings folded in their speckled wings, chilled flames shuddering at the tips. Students wandered across campus as if under water, hands and hair unfurling, their soundless mouths churning— irate or ecstatic, I couldn't tell—ready to burn it all down or break into song. When I looked back her eyes had found the window: tree, students, birds swimming by, mute in their element. It was painful to hear the papery rasp of her folding and unfolding hands, to watch color smudging her neck and temple, branching to mist the delicate rim of one ear. I listened to the air sunder between us, the feverish hush collapse. I could hear her breath—smoke rising from ice. I could see what it cost her to make that leap. What heat it takes for the body to blossom into speech.