Bury the Children in the Yard by Andersen Prunty Page A

he’d been holding for the past five minutes.
     
    He Was Content to Muddle Along in His Sad Existence
     
    He got in his battered car and drove home through the gray Ohio evening. The college was not a city college. It was a small college in a small college town. He drove down Main Street, past all the historical homes, their windows glowing warmly. He imagined the happy families inside. Families gathering at home for the holidays over good food, strong drink, and warm fires. Many of the houses, he knew, were owned by professors just like him. Some of the more expensive homes were owned by the administrators and the department heads. He could have been one of them. It would have been so easy to become one of them. But a long time ago, something had derailed. He could pinpoint it but he didn’t like to do that. At least not consciously. He was content to muddle along in his sad existence and didn’t want to seem like the victim.
    He turned off Main Street, into college housing now. Some of the houses were just as large but there was a generally squalid quality to most of them, owned by landlords who didn’t really care and rented by people who would be living for nine months at the most, sometimes two or three or more to a bedroom. Then he was away from the town and into the country, on his way to his shabby apartment in a trashy Dayton suburb.
    He wondered when his heart was going to stop racing.
     
    Neither Nabokov Nor Coltrane
     
    It was dawn before he finally fell asleep. He kept thinking that what had happened in his classroom with Ashley couldn’t have possibly happened. He was drawn tight with sexual tension and had to fight the urge to masturbate, a desire he gave into daily, sometimes more than once. It was a desire that made him feel invigorated and alive because he knew it wouldn’t be around forever.
    Nothing ever was.
    He’d been reading Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading and, by the time he decided to go to bed, realized he hadn’t digested a word. The John Coltrane record he’d been listening to had stopped a while ago. Even the irritating sounds of the white trash neighborhood – arguing, drunken yelling, dogs barking, sirens, shitty cars with bad exhaust systems – had gone unnoticed. He couldn’t stop thinking about Ashley. It was always the quiet ones. He knew she wouldn’t expect anything more than a few days with him, but she hadn’t seemed the type. Normally her hair was not worn in pigtails but down. It was a coppery brownish color and wildly curly. She was what most her age probably referred to as “cute” rather than “hot.” Apparently cute was his type. While he made it a habit of covertly ogling students she was someone he found himself returning to. And sometimes he had even fantasized about her during his masturbation sessions. The word “ripe” often popped into his head when he looked at her. She was perfect, right now, at this age. She dressed mostly conservatively. Even what she wore today, if not such a cliché, would have been considered conservative. Hell, it was still the uniform at a lot of Catholic high schools. Sometimes he would play a game where he looked at his students and imagined the rest of their lives for them. He saw Ashley dating around in college. Mostly friends of friends. She wasn’t a bar type. Not a hookup type. She would graduate college and maybe begin work on a master’s degree, but her first priority would be to find some sort of boring, stable job. If she were lucky, it would even pay for her education. She would eventually meet someone she met at work or through a coworker. Someone who was verifiably economically stable and emotionally sound. By this time, she would be carrying a few extra pounds. Still cute but no longer ripe. The type of woman you know is going to get fat. She would eventually marry someone who was basically just like her and it wouldn’t really matter anyway. At this point, both of their biological clocks would be