Read Online A Butterfly in Flame by Nicholas Kilmer - Free Book Online Page B

think it’s Wednesday?
    “But pushing on, since it’s not my class—or we’d, if we really wanted to find out, talk to Missy Tutunjian’s roommate or—but I don’t have much time. Since Emily Dickinson’s day we’ve made the toilets better, we’ve improved the railroads, let’s see what we can do with Emily’s poems.
    “Here’s the assignment. While you work on it I’ll talk to you one at a time, see where we are. Here’s the assignment. Take any poem by Emily Dickinson. Find your books, share them, whatever. Copy the poem. Write it again making it better by subtracting six words. Write it again, making it better by adding six words. Write it again, making it better by removing twelve words and substituting twelve different words. For extra credit write an extra stanza of your own and stick it in somewhere. Make it so much like one of Emily’s that we can’t tell—A stanza is one of those blocks of lines, usually four lines in Emily’s poems—that we can’t tell which is the fake. Right.” He looked at his watch. “Get started.
    “At the same time we’ll begin getting acquainted.”
    He motioned to the woman who had flinched when he mentioned Missy Tutunjian’s roommate.

Chapter Fourteen
    The young woman rose, gave a brief, inquiring look at the girl next to her, and pulled from the back pocket of her jeans the copy of Emily Dickinson that she had been sitting on. She looked to Fred the question whether she should also gather up her canvas bag. Fred shook his head and gestured, then led the way, to the corner farthest from the sounds of the neighboring classroom, and cleared a space amongst the easels, next to the sink.
    The student following him was tall and pink, with curly red hair both short and unkempt. She was pretty in a distracted way. As she approached, her colleagues were either finding their books among their belongings, or easing closer to people who had them or—a few of them—drifting toward the door that would lead them to their lockers or toward escape.
    “Let’s grab a couple of these things,” Fred suggested, laying hold of one of the unfamiliar objects of furniture. “What do you call them?”
    “Horses. I don’t know why,” she said. “The neck, maybe.” She stroked the high side.
    “Or it’s translated from French,” Fred suggested. “Easel is
chevalet
and a
cheval
is a horse. Come to think, easel means donkey in some language, maybe Dutch.
    “I’m Fred.”
    The horses were positioned with their high ends close to each other. “Susan,” she said, sitting astride her horse and crossing her arms on the high end. Her shirt was of a heavy green, almost military twill, and a black cotton vest with brass buttons bibbed the copious breasts.
    Fred sat and crossed his arms. “When you draw, I guess the drawing board is supported on the neck of the horse?”
    “One end. The other end goes here,” Susan said. She pointed toward the dark line across her thighs where a continual rain of particles of charcoal must fall while she was working, drawing.
    “What’s the hardest thing you’re doing? The hardest class this year?”
    “So far nothing’s been easy,” Susan said. “First you think, heck, it’s art, how hard can that be? Then it’s six hours drawing one thing and getting it wrong a hundred ways, after you get started. Then they grade you. Can you believe it? A grade on a drawing? Can you believe I flunked a drawing of a cube first term? I couldn’t believe it. A cube. Six sides but the most you can possibly see at one time is four of them and mostly it’s three unless it sits on one point. I couldn’t believe it. I flunked it.”
    “So that’s the hardest thing?”
    “No. Jesus, that was only the wakeup. No, the hardest thing is what she’s making us do now.”
    “She, meaning Meg Harrison?”
    “Right.” Susan nodded. She fiddled with her Laurel Poetry Series
Emily Dickinson.
    “Yes?” Fred prompted.
    “You mean, the assignment? We all have