Another Lovecraftian cosmic horror piece.
History’s Ghost is about a grad student who inherits a dead professor’s class. At first, the narrator is just happy to have some extra cash during the semester, but the old lectures that contain the dead professor’s voice begins to haunt him–and a further mystery unfolds…
I wrote this during the COVID pandemic, where I ended up recording a lot of my lectures. I was also pregnant during a lot of those recordings, and kept wanting to record ahead of time. Yet I was deeply paranoid that doing so would jinx something, so I put off doing my lectures ahead of time until I was almost nine months pregnant. Then, so I could be both practical and paranoid, I indulged my obsessive thoughts with this story.
I hope you enjoy it too!
History’s Ghost
By Eve Morton
I knew the professor was dead the moment the school called me. While I was used to last minute teaching posts–being a contract faculty member at a local university gives one all the prestige of being called “doctor” none of the convenience of being treated like one–there was no way that someone could abandon a course like this after only a week into the semester without some kind of tragedy undermining the entire operation. If the original instructor had been a woman, I would have considered her departure to be a quicker-than-first-believed mat leave. But it was a man, named Ralph Anderson, and despite being at the school for the past ten years, I had never heard of him before.
“Was he tenured?” I asked, evoking the dangling carrot for many in my profession. “I don’t recognize the name.”
“He was brilliant,” the head of my department said. She evaded the other question. “I’m sorry you never got a chance to meet him.”
“I’m sure I’ll get to know him now, through his work.”
“I suppose we live on in our research. Even if only one person reads the dissertation, it makes it seem like ten years of work has gone somewhere, right?”
I nodded. Marta detailed the subject area of my new teaching post, all without outright offering me the job for the first fifteen minutes. Though I’d gone to graduate school here, taken one of her classes on Shakespeare, she didn’t seem to recognize me. “I see from your CV that you’ve published a few papers in the area of medieval history. Would his class on the history of the 100 Years War and the Black Death be something you’d be willing to take? On such short notice?”
“Yes, of course.” I should have let her speak longer, tell me more difficulties. But I had a student debt to pay. “I’d love to teach the course. Sounds fascinating already.”
“Good. He’s done most of the work already. You’ll find some of his lectures, or the notes for them, already pre-recorded on his online website for the course. The class runs from 2-5 on Monday and Wednesday.”
I already had a class that term which ran from 1-2:30pm in another part of the campus. When I reminded her of that, she nodded as if she should have realized. I thought she was going to take away the job from me right then–something of which I had already started to allocate the money for in different debts and for different items in my rundown apartment I desperately needed–but she only nodded.
“Should be okay. Just start the class a half hour late. Like I said, most of the material has already been recorded. If need be, you can play that for the students until you arrive.”
“Oh. Okay. That makes sense.” An eerie feeling came over me then, as if there was a ghost in the room. Or rather, as if I was being encouraged to be a ghost in the room, nothing but a conjurer, a lion tamer, for a former professor who no longer had the course, but had done all the work.
It was here when I understood he was dead. And possibly a suicide, given the sudden nature and the way in which she smiled vaguely and shook my hand on acceptance in a strained, limp grip. Why else do all the work for a class and then suddenly exit the scene? Sure, Dr. Ralph Anderson could have had a heart attack or suffered in a car crash, but this was the Arts Department and we were all a sensitive lot I wanted to feel bad for him; I wanted to mourn him in a way people often feel the need to mourn when they see tied up teddy bears against telephone poles, marking hit and run victims, but I could only be grateful. Joyful.
Another class to teach. Another couple thousand in my bank account. I left the meeting feeling elated, almost as much as when I was first rehired by the school as a professor and not as a grad student, thinking it would lead to a career and not piecemeal postings here and there. I even got a bit drunk at the campus bar, spending my money before I even had it. When I mentioned the professor’s name to the bartender at the professor-frequented establishment, he had no idea who I was talking about.
“Ralph Anderson,” I said again, my speech slightly slurred and animated. “He taught medieval history.”
Cameron, the bartender, opened his mouth to say something, but then shook it.
“What? Did you pick him up one night?”
“Not exactly,” Cameron said, and then, flirting with me because he could, he said, “Don’t be jealous, Monroe. I still only have eyes for you.”
“But you know the name?”
“I know a medieval history professor. Or rather, I knew him. This old guy used to come in here all the time and tell me things about the Black Death. You know, the bubonic plague.” He pronounced it boo-bonic. “A lot of fun things there, believe it or not. Like night pigs! Did you know they had two sets of pigs develop because of all the bodies in the street? One set of pigs that ate during the day, tore the bodies open and ate the blood and infected flesh–only to die again in the street, of course–and then there were the nocturnal pigs, the ones that dug through the graveyard dirt and got the corpses up from the ground, and then of course, they ate them and died too.”
“That’s disgusting,” I said. “I’m going to be sick.”
“Yeah, well, he made it funny. But I don’t remember his name. I called him Night Pig for a while there.” Cameron furrowed his brows. “I wonder if I upset him, and that’s why he didn’t come back.”
“How long ago?”
Cameron made a gesture that meant years, years, when you were a wee babe. He gave me another refill on my beer, but I was now feeling ill. I said so aloud, and so I left my drink half-finished with a nice tip for Cameron. I drew a pig on the bill before I left. I had no idea why; it just felt like the thing I should be doing.
At home, I fell asleep under a pile of old laundry and my ever-present and always in the apartment blanket which moved from couch to computer chair and back again. When I woke up a few hours later, I guzzled water. I recalled dreams of medieval England with roves of wandering flagellants, whipping themselves in the name of Jesus, so they could fight the plague and please God again. I didn’t remember ever reading anything like that before in any books on the era, yet I knew it to be true. Something Cameron said? About the former history prof who also drank under his gaze, maybe even with a guiding hand?
A chill passed through me. I grabbed my blanket, curling it around me like a king, and sat in front of my computer with a glass of water. I wanted to review the material for my course, since I had an alert that the online system had been transferred to me. When I accessed it, I saw the outside page as a student. The syllabus, the assignments, the readings. Basic stuff. Only a handful of personalized announcements were present, most of which were answering frequent questions about textbook edition or policy on plagiarism software. The course had only been going for a week and the last announcement was one cancelling this week’s session.
I’m out of the area, students. Got stuck somewhere and it’s too late now to getaway. I’ll be cancelling classes today, Dr. Ralph Anderson wrote. Follow along with the reading. I’ll be with you again as soon as I can.
That was it.
Yet its sparseness, and its recentness in the queue of the announcements, made me think once again that this man had died. One moment he’d been telling them that the fifth edition was just as good as the sixth, but with different page numbers, utterly banal and pedandtic like a good professor, then the next moment he was gone and it was too late to do anything about it. The words “too late” repeated in my head in a different voice, as if warning me about something. Too late, too late. And it’s ten percent off your paper when you hand it in after the due date.
I shook my head. The voice was gone.
When I turned the online system into one that let me see Dr. Anderson’s notes, I thought there had been a computer glitch. The entire site changed design. The banners were in another color, the logo for the school was different, and so was the font. It seemed like I had hit the WayBack Machine online; I was looking at an early prototype for a class that had been designed in the early era of the accompanying online programs. I went to the announcements page again only to find the date to be the same as before; everything looked strange and archaic, but it was still showing the current year.
“Odd,” I said. My apartment echoed the words back. I needed to buy shelves, rather than keep relying on milk crates. I needed furniture to fill up the void, so my words didn’t echo back like that. I chilled. I grabbed the blanket tighter around me. “Very odd.”
On the content page for the class, everything was still in the old format, but it was all present and accounted for. There were notes and accompanying lessons, just like my department chair Marta had promised, and so I clicked on one of them. A man’s voice, clear and lucid and sounding very much like a dry history professor’s, like the one I’d conjured for him in my head, began to speak.
“The Black Death only grew in strength because of the 100 Years War, and the Great Famine before it ensuring that most of the inhabitants of the countries hit the worst were already suffering, already struggling to survive.” I skipped ahead in the lecture file, since it was forty minutes long. The recording got a little fuzzy near the end, as if there was static or more echoes. “We will continue this talk on the environmental conditions before we jump into the gory bits. I know it’s disappointing, but it’s a must in order to understand why things have happened as they happen. If we don’t, history will only repeat itself.”
I went to the next week’s class, clicked play. “I want to talk about the animals that you would see roaming around during this period,” Dr. Anderson continued, his voice slightly more animated than before. “We’re talking about fleas as the means of transmission for the Black Plague, which most of us have enough understanding of biology to grasp how it occurred. Dirty and filth leads to fleas, which carry the bacteria, which keep jumping from animals to humans and back again. Remember that this is not a virus–not like AIDs or the flu we get every year–but a bacteria. That means it’s alive in a different way than a virus, so it thinks in a different way, it has a different ecosystem, of which the fleas were only one part. Remember also that there is no technical cure for this sort of malady. Once you get it, there is no immunization. You can get it again, and again, and again.”
I skimmed forward again, hoping to find the section on pigs that Cameron had mentioned. Right near the end, mere seconds before the recording cut out, he said, “nocturnal animals became even more aggressive during this era. There were pigs who lived in the plague pits, those mass graves which–“
Then there was nothing.
I cursed, finding the content utterly thrilling, and went directly to the next week’s session hoping for some type of ending to the night pigs and their saga. It was the exact same story that Cameron had told me, complete with the same jokes and corny lines; Dr. Ralph Anderson and the former medieval prof in the bar were one in the same. Why didn’t Cameron remember him from this term? It had only been a week, sure, but there had been previous contact. Extended conversations and familiarity. And this was material that Dr. Anderson had been teaching for a long time. Though I only had this one class, and these scattered recordings, each one contained a distinct narrative arc, complete with facts, figures, and characters. Like those night pigs. They stole the show.
The lecture, I corrected. They informed the lecture.
When I tried to find dates for the recordings, there was only the current posting schedule for when these lectures would become relevant; everything was in the future, as if Dr. Anderson had time-travelled into another era digitally, while also living in the past.
“And being dead in the future,” I said. I shivered. I still could not get the notion that this man was dead and gone from my head. That he was the ghost in the proverbial machine, and that eventually, I’d get to the end of his life like the end of the Plague history in the invisible-to-students lecture queue.
I put on the next lecture, then the next, scanning for some sign of madness, of violence, of transgression. But he merely told the entire history of the Black Death, adding in asides that were interesting–did you know about the flagellants, those who whipped themselves in the name of Jesus? did you know about the popes who were, despite common impulse to believe that this illness was a punishment from god, science-forward? and they wanted to find that scientific cure?–and then the course was over.
“Be sure you submit your final papers in the proper formatting,” he said on one of the last recordings, one that was clearly made in a classroom. I could hear the chairs scraping before he was done lecturing about MLA and deductions for wrong citations. His voice was lost in the mass exodus of a class finally leaving for their exam season. There was chatter, footsteps, and then only breathing and small noises as Ralph cleaned off his desk. The recording was still going, though he was no longer lecturing. There were at least ten more minutes on here. I held my breath as I waited and listened.
For what? I still wasn’t entirely sure.
“Professor Anderson?” a female voice asked. It sounded familiar to me. The chair of my department? She sounded so young, it seemed impossible. Yet when he said, “Hello Marta, how are you?” I knew it was her.
“I was wondering about the final assignment. Could I possibly wrote on the resurgence of the plague that’s been happening in smaller communities?” She listed off a few recent cases, ones which I had never heard of, but immediately began to Google as I let the recording continue to play. “I wanted to compare the treatment of religion then to the treatment of science now. Or vice versa. I’m still working out the details…”
He gave her advice, but it was soon cut off by a hand–or fabric, or something heavy-over the speaker of the recorder. I had a flash in my mind in that moment of an answering machine that used little tiny tapes; the type of recording device my mother had used when she completed her night school education, and recorded her lectures, so she could review them later on via the tape deck in her car as she drove to work. As a cassette tape, not as a digital file like this was now; a tape recorder with something you had to physically rewind and then turn around to the other side. I could hear that same rewinding motion as this recording cut off mid-sentence, as Dr. Anderson gave Marta advice on how to make history modern even without bringing up more recent cases.
“It’s not that I don’t love that idea,” he said. “History repeats itself all the time. It’s where our better ghosts live, and those ghosts can often give us the best lessons. But how can you use the history we know for sure, that we know the definite consequences of from the mid-1300s to make the same point you’d like to make with these modern ghosts? And what is the point you want to make?”
“I guess–“
The tape was over. Online, I couldn’t find the exact cases Marla spoke about for the plague, but I did find a general plague counter that the CDC had established. There were roughly seven cases per year in North America alone; it had never gone away, not entirely, not forever. Most of the modern cases were concentrated in third world countries, in places that had a lot of rural areas, and people who were sheepherders were the most common demographic. But there were still cases in cities, still cases amongst the young, those who had never once touched an animal other than a household pet in their entire lives.
Another chill passed through my apartment, over my skin, and then down to my ankles where it stayed. Something shoved my feet under the desk, like a cat demanding my attention.
Or a night pig.
Or fleas.
I looked under the desk. I saw nothing but my bare feet, nothing but the pens and papers I’d dropped under there, nothing but a desperate need to vacuum. I shoved away from my desk, closing the laptop, and after checking my entire body for bugs and bites, I went to bed just as the sun came up.
*
Teaching my first class for Dr. Ralph Anderson was far less dramatic than reading through the files online. The students were older, a bit more organized and invested than your basic first years who still wanted you to be a high school teacher or their parents, but they were still only here because they had to be. They regarded me skeptically for a few minutes, wondering where Professor Anderson had gone, but they eventually came around and accepted my authority. They answered the questions. They engaged in the material.
I couldn’t have asked for a better first class.
When one student, the keener of the group–as there was always one–came over to me at the end of the session, she asked the very same questions I’d seen answered in that week’s announcement from Dr. Anderson. I hadn’t made it visible yet, though, and so I told her to be patient.
“Okay, will do,” she said, but lingered.
“Is there anything else I can help you with, Cassandra?”
“No. I just… where is Professor. Anderson again? You said he was still away from campus, but I… I’m afraid.”
“You’re afraid?” I repeated. She nodded, her dark eyes wide. “What are you afraid of?”
“He’s dead, isn’t he?”
I was never good at lying–the main reason I was not a high school teacher–and so I nodded. “I don’t know for sure,” I quickly added. “But it’s seeming that way. How did he seem to you the last time you saw him?”
“Sad,” she said. “Like he wanted to keep teaching, but that… something had run out.”
“Too late,” I said, repeating the line from his announcement.
“Yeah, exactly. Like a person who knows they have to pay for a parking meter.”
“Interesting analogy. Quite poetic.”
She beamed at the praise, told me she was also taking creative writing that semester. “I should go to that class, actually. I just wanted to know if there was a card I could send, or funeral I should be attending to.”
“I don’t think so.” I got a sudden image of everyone in medieval England forgoing funerals and merely throwing plague victims into pits, burying them, and hoping for the best. “I will let you know if anything changes.”
“Thank you.”
I waited until she was gone from the room before I let out a breath. Of course, I thought. If he’s really died, there will be a funeral. If he’s been part of the school for as long as it seemed from some of these lectures, then there had to be some kind of memorial page. Even if he didn’t have tenure.
I used the computer in the classroom to look up his name on the website. Nothing in the news, nothing in the general Google search for funeral homes close by either. I only found more classes he was teaching that semester, more classes that surely had been handed off to other contract workers. One class, on the Crusades and the Inquisition, called The History of Torture from 1000-1500, was starting in under an hour and across campus.
I figured it was about time to get familiar with yet another era of history. Just to see if, like he suggested, this was where our better ghosts lived.
*
A young professor named Dr. Julie Norton had been assigned this class. She was blonde and had great teeth; she smiled a lot as she went through the rather barbaric history leading up to the start of the Crusades to set the tone for the class. The room was filled with even more than the regular registered thirty-five students per class. There was more like fifty, sixty people filling the rows of desks and chairs. Not everyone was student-aged, nor were they decked out like a mature-student, either; they were like me, regular people part of the campus, but who had wandered into the room upon hearing the brutality, and were curious enough to stay around.
Though Julie spoke all of the lecture herself, and gestured to a recently made Power-Point slide with images that could only have been scraped together from Google Image Search, I heard Dr. Anderson in her voice. His particular turns of phrases, his macabre humor, all the things I’d listened to obsessively the night before. She must have had a similar experience to me, opening up her course and being rewarded with insight into the mind of a professor as it sprawled through the dead but still somehow living landscape of history.
“Can you imagine?” Julie said, gesturing to one of the famous torture racks on the board. “Being questioned like this? Having everything you’d ever known ripped from you, and being given nothing but pain to contemplate? Of course you’d give in. You’d say anything to make it stop. Torture never actually works to produce new information. We see this now, with waterboarding and any number of other practices we disguise as advanced interrogation. It’s happened before. It’s happening right now. History always is in the present moment. Nothing new is ever born. It’s always recycled, always already and currently happening.”
“Sort of like a ghost,” I said, and swore that Julie whispered it as well.
The lecture was over–the time on the wall declared it so, along with the ending of the PowerPoint presentation–yet no one left the room. They lingered at the front, wanting to ask Julie a dozen more questions, or they lingered in the back, discussing the topics amongst themselves. Every single student and straggler alike had been whipped into a frenzy.
I waited. By the time everyone had gone, it was nearly ten at night. I was starving, yet I felt no need for food. I could only see the images of the pigs tearing apart bodies for blood and puss, and then collapsing afterwards on the medieval streets. Or of teeth being removed one by one, in order to extract some sort of truth about the person’s perceived relationship to God, the Devil, or something in between.
“Hi,” Julie said, her smile worn down from hours of talking. “Can I help you?”
“Yes. Sort of. I hope. I’m teaching a class for Dr. Anderson as well.”
“Oh.” Her face went pale, and then she laughed easily. “I suppose that makes sense. He was given a full course load. There are probably many of us out there, teaching his words, reading through the old notes.”
“So you’ve seen it too, right? You’ve heard it too?”
“The ghosts?” she asked.
“The pigs?” I echoed. “The Night Pigs?”
“Poltergeist,” she whispered vaguely, this time in her own voice. “German for noisy ghost. History’s poltergeist has many forms, I guess.”
“It’s pigs for me. Is it teeth for you? The crunch of torture racks?”
“Yes. No. I have to go.”
She gathered all of her items–the laptop, the notes for the PowerPoint, the pens and papers and her cell phone–in a hurried gesture. She apologized meekly, not meeting my eyes as she explained she didn’t want to be too late for a bus. I stood at the front of the lecture hall, everything now empty and hollow. I cursed, heard the echo, and then the same distortion from the last recorded words. An echo, a crunch of bone, a snorting of pigs.
This was the place. The last place Dr. Anderson taught.
I was about to leave when I noticed a Post-It Note under the front desk. I picked it up, knowing that it could have come from anywhere or anyone, but also understanding that it was for me. From this professor to Julie Norton, then to Diego Ruiz, to Andy Watkins, and to Cecilia Jiang, to all the other contract workers who were teaching Dr. Anderson’s work. I would find each one of them in the coming days and nights, sit in on their lectures, and hear them speak in his voice as if possessed. As if history’s ghost could only handle so much; it needed to be spread out to bear the weight.
None of those other contract workers wanted to speak with me after their class, either. Each one, when they realized I knew what they knew, had seen what they’d seen, grew pale. Gathered their items. And then ran away, saying they were going to be late, too late, and left me alone in a lecture room with the echoes of madness and references in my ear.
The Post-It note listed an address around the corner from the official archives of the city. After turning up so many dead ends, it was the only place I had left to go.
*
The building was a three story brick structure, possibly from the late 1970s era of architecture that emphasized sharp lines and a brutalist exterior. Nothing fancy or ornate about it. Sandwiched between a Laundromat and a check cashing place, it looked like the type of cheap rental apartment building that catered to the student crowd of the city. Stairs led up to the front door, and once inside, brass animals flanked a front desk. I thought they were pigs, but when I looked again, I only saw lions. They were the only ornate feature so far that I’d seen, and so my attention was immediately directed to their flowing manes and muted roars.
“Can I help you?” A woman popped her head around from the front desk. She seemed small, almost elfin. She had a large book in front of her and tapped it. “You’ll need to sign in before going much further.”
“Of course.” I walked to the desk and grasped a pen in my hand that was on a chain, like at the old banks in my neighborhood. The woman watched me as I signed my name, said hello after reading my name upside down, and then beamed when I seemed impressed.
“I do it a lot,” she said. “Read upside down. Everyone else is so secretive, I have to find my ways of getting entertainment sitting up here all day. You have a nice name. It means dove. Did you know that?”
“Oh, no, I didn’t. Neat.” When I closed the book, I caught glimpses of names I was now familiar with–Andy, Diego, Cecilia, and of course, Julie. “What is this place?”
“A storage area. Nothing more, nothing less. Don’t expect a tour or anything.” She laughed and tucked her body back underneath the large desk and the closed ledger. “I’m just the brass at the front. Everything else here is self-directed.”
“I can go wherever I want, then?”
She laughed lightly. “No! But I take it you’re here for Dr. Anderson’s effects? He’s been a popular guy the last little while.”
“Has he?” I asked, and relished the present-tense of his name. “He’s been here, too?”
“Always here, in a way. This is where we store his research.”
“Oh.” My heart sunk. “Isn’t there some sort of privacy consideration? Can I go and look?”
“No privacy, not anymore. He’s signed over his material to us. You know, sort of like storage wars, but we didn’t need to win an auction. It’s just… ours now. You’re welcome to look through his items. Here.” She wrote down the number and floor I had to go to in order to access his materials. The Post-It note was exactly the one that had fallen on the floor in the lecture hall. Not that these weren’t ubiquitous in academia, or in business, but I was sure it was from the same pad. The same lot. The same everything.
I thanked her again and made my way to the elevators at the back of the building. I still had no idea what I was doing, only that I needed to do this. I still had a class to teach in three hours–not Dr. Anderson’s, but my own–and that knowledge pressed against me like a burden, like a dentist appointment I didn’t want to go to, rather than my passion. What had my dissertation even been about? I wondered. All I could think about now was medieval England, the plague, and the life and now the definite end of Dr. Anderson.
I stepped out of the elevator on the third floor. A narrow hallway was flanked on either side by large, orange roll up doors which led into storage lockers. I soon located Dr. Anderson’s in the middle, but when I went to open it up, I realized I didn’t have the locker code.
“Shoot.” I was about to go downstairs again to talk to the front desk lady, when I impulsively put in the year 1346, the first year of the Black Death. It clicked open. “The worst year to be alive,” I said in Dr. Anderson’s voice, now so much like my own in my ear, as I opened the locker. “The worst year of the worst century. To be remembered forever and ever and ever as a noisy ghost.”
There was nothing inside the locker.
Not a damn thing.
I blinked several times, not believing what I was seeing. I walked inside, right towards the back of the five foot by five foot cell-like space, and scoured the corners, the walls, for something, anything–but there was not even a trace of something left behind, not even another Post-It note with cryptic writing.
Had one of the other profs beaten me here? Had they gathered all his items and taken them back to their apartments, where they could tear through the pages of his old dissertation, of his finalized notes, of his course evaluations? I suddenly had the image of my fellow colleagues as night pigs, digging deep in a pit of research, and pulling out rejected paper after rejected paper, eating the second reviewer’s shitty comments, and then keeling over, dying, because everything was infected. I envisioned them tearing apart the papers as bodies torn apart on torture wracks. Extracting harsh reviews like rotten teeth, and then rewriting those papers to include the commenter’s reviews, like a false confession.
I let out a low breath. It came back to me as a chill. This room was empty, this room was hollow and contained nothing other than my own paranoid fear, yet I was so determined to find something more. I went to a corner and I felt the soft concrete around it. I wanted to dig. I wanted to burrow into other areas, into other lockers, steal someone else’s shit and call it my treasure for the day.
Instead, the door to the storage locker came down with a thwap. I bolted to my feet. I went back to the door, grabbed the handle, and tried to jerk it up.
Nothing.
Only orange stared at me, blinding orange against so many muted concrete tones. I banged on the door.
“Hello? Hello? Hey!” I called out. “I’m trapped. Help!”
Nothing. Only more echoes.
I sunk down on the floor, crossing my legs, and heaving another sigh. When I looked up, I saw a microphone hanging from the ceiling. A microphone and a recorder, the kind my mother had used in my youth and her night school days, the kind that Dr. Anderson had also used. There was nothing else around, nothing else there. Just a recorder, a microphone.
“This was where you recorded.”
I stood and reached up. I only dragged the bottom of the mic. I got on my tippy-toes. I cursed being so short; Dr. Anderson must have been at least six feet to get this high. I struggled, I jumped, and eventually, the whole thing crashed to the floor of the storage locker.
I grasped it in my hands, wincing at the possible damage, but nothing was broken. I checked the tape–rewound, ready to go–and then I hit record.
“Hello,” I said. “I’d like to finish up my lecture series before all of this comes to an end, before it’s too late.”
I didn’t need my notes anymore, not even for my other classes that I’d been neglecting. It was easy to speak, easy to remember. Almost as if it was all happening again before my eyes.
As I spoke, as I told story after bloody story of history and its aftermath, I heard the echoes all around me. Other people, other contract professors and grad students in other storage rooms with different microphones, recording their lessons. Putting down their voices into the machine of the system, so much like a ghost, yet utterly true, utterly living and breathing for the time being. I recorded. They recorded. The school would come and take the tapes when we were done, put them in another version, put them online, and then hand them off to someone else to teach while we continued to speak and speak and speak history’s story, history’s noisy past.
Then another group of students, curious and devoted and passionate, would find their way here.
It was easy enough to do. You simply followed what made you happy, followed what made you whole.
When I reached the end of my lesson, I stopped the recording. It was dark outside, though there was no light or window to verify what I knew to be true. My phone was dead, not that I could have gotten a signal through the thick walls. I heard nothing around me, not even the echoes of other professors.
I waited.
And when the pigs came, snorting and pounding their hooves against the concrete floors, I was ready for them. Not to fight, but to be devoured as part of history, so others would learn, and not repeat the same mistakes I’d made.
END
Eve Morton 