She’d always, The Student, underlined in her books, dog-
eared the pages. It was as if without these markings
she couldn’t understand what was written, couldn’t feel
the words alive in her mind. The blueblack liquid
corralled, as it dried, the text into something concentrated,
something a bit her own. A garden
drying in the sun, wrung out, pressed by the sky
’s knowing. This was as part of reading as seeing.
She brought to each book her small void,
bouquet of nothing, a vase-shaped, cut glass lack
and would stuff it up with passages, themselves tunnels
elsewhere. The rest of the book, it seemed, could disappear,

and she would still possess some part of it. Was this
another book altogether, she thought, her book? At night,
on special occasions she could not induce at will, the words
would turn color—a red insulated by a thin border of spring
green—and hover slightly off the page, as if the paper
had released its hold, was handing the words over to her. They seemed,
these letters, to tremble—Christmas gelatin. She’d shake
her head to exaggerate this phenomenon, a private dance,
a direct communication from the writer, or, even better,
from the secret soul inside the book (that all books possessed).
More probable, she knew, was that something was wrong
with her eyes. They were reading The Scarlet Letter 

and Ms. Russell, her 10th-grade teacher, pulled her aside after a failed quiz.
When something important happens on the page, she said,
choose a word or phrase that corresponds and write it
at the top, so you remember. The Student began with Chapter 10: “Torture”
she wrote in the blank and yellowing space on page 117, “appearances
and reality” (129) “she has removed the sin from herself”
“rebellion returning” (160) “limbo again” (174) “Pearl wants
the letter back” (192) “What did he whisper” (201) and then, simply,
“Seeing” (206). This went on forever. Well into adulthood, she wondered
if these words were the right ones. Sometimes a hole would appear,
moving its blurry center wherever she hauled her eyes. Words slipped
over the edge, withdrawing to a forest where she could not follow.

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From Tantrums in Air by Emily Skillings. Copyright © 2025. Available from The Song Cave.