A man's presence often lingers long after he is gone, and sometimes it's best to erase all evidence of him. She intends to feed the boy's essay to the shredder the moment he leaves her office. Even to use it as kindling would be taboo. She studies his face and finds that he looks not unlike the college boys who used to enroll in her husband's chemistry courses, but then again all of these young men look alike—the same simian forehead sprinkled with acne, the same unintelligent eyes that cast a hubristic gaze over the world, uncouth strangers who snort and scratch themselves and unleash pestilential clouds of stale breath. But ghosts of the living as well as the dead haunt the imagination, so it's only natural that she sees her former lovers everywhere she turns.
At least this boy has enough sense to pull up his pants and start making excuses.
"The party..." he murmurs, a stunned expression on his face.
"Yes, I must be going, too. People are expecting me."
He slinks toward the door, but instead of hurrying away, he lingers there at the threshold, his shirt untucked, his zipper still down. He looks back at her, his cheeks suddenly drained of color. He steps into the hallway and slides up against the wall as though afraid of falling into a black pit. Something is out there, something that frightens him. Her husband's ghost? Has he followed her here? Has he been watching them? The boy stumbles over his own feet, regains his balance, and then races down the stairs.
Fully aware that she's been ensnared in some kind of trap, Batya checks her makeup in the mirror, the mascara, the royal blue eyeliner. She buttons her blouse, straightens her skirt. No need to rush. It's not quite eight o'clock, time enough for a little more tea. She stands at the window, drinking straight from the bottle now, and watches the students dancing across the quad. They are dressed as if for a drunken masquerade. Several boys creep along the sidewalk like zombies, their clothes in tatters, their faces painted in death masks of pale green. Others are dressed as cardinals and grand inquisitors. Another figure with a mangy tail and pointed ears comes bounding across the jumbled cobblestones and howls up at the gothic tower. Buffoons one and all with no sense of decorum. She finds it puzzling that the Jesuits tolerate this sort of mischief. Don't most clergymen regard Halloween as an abomination, a mockery of their most cherished beliefs?
She puts the bottle down on her desk and from the drawer retrieves the .38. Only then does she walk to the door, and what she finds there makes her smile. Indeed, she is so impressed by the menacing stagecraft that she wants to applaud.
Like an infestation of scuttling green bugs, the plastic soldiers swarm in the hallway outside her office, a hundred battle-hardened men, wounded, scarred, disfigured, their torsos crisscrossed with heavy belts of ammunition, their eyes fixed on a distant point in space. They've been sent here on a secret mission and are determined to achieve their objective. But what exactly is the objective? To kill the ravenous cougar that prowls these halls at night, attacking innocent boys? Since the Church can no longer use coercion as a tool, it must rely on intimidation. It's just as well. After all, it's not violence but the threat of violence that has proven so effective the world over. People are driven by fear and self-preservation, and powerful men exploit this weakness to achieve their own wicked ends. But Batya Pinter refuses to be guided by these base emotions. It's a decision she made long ago.
She raises the gun and puts the steel barrel to her head. She has done this many times before, has contemplated squeezing the trigger, and never once has she experienced even a fleeting moment of mortal terror. In this regard the gun has been very instructive, a pedagogical tool unmatched by any textbook; it's a way to test her willpower, her soundness of mind. When he died, her husband left no note, no explanation for his actions. Instead, he left her this gun. And now he expects her to do the right thing.
She counts backwards from ten and then lowers the barrel. The test complete, she puts the .38 in her purse and grabs the broom and dustpan. It has become routine for her, sweeping up these toy soldiers, and after she dumps them in the trashcan she turn off the lights and leaves her office for one more day.
Rose McCann has been published in a number of literary journals, including Slow Trains, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Subtle Tea, Cerebration, Fiction Warehouse, The Plum Ruby Review, Ascent Aspirations, Double Dare Press, Tattoo Highway and many others. She currently teaches American Literature at Cleveland State University.