This is a work of horror fiction in blog form.
To read it from the beginning, you will have
to go to the oldest post and move forward
from there….




Tuesday, March 8, 2011

her intellectual superiority

Linda Putridrine, Ph.D., associate professor (tenure track), winner of the Dickens-Luz Prize for Advanced Scholarship, and The Darling of the Department, was in the women’s toilet on the third floor. The Faculty Only one. That locked. So students wouldn’t go in.

She finished, listening to the rush of urine into the bowl. For some reason, that sound had always pleased her. It made her feel she had Done Something. If she had thought about it—which she hadn’t—she might have wondered at the satisfaction she felt at such moments. She might have realized that her pleasure came from the days of her extreme youth, from when her mother would glow with pride and sing her praises for having tinkled in the little pot rather than in her pants.

She finished and cleaned herself, using the last of the paper to do so. It never occurred to her to replace the roll with a fresh one from the cabinet under the sink. Such things were for lesser people. When she left, too, she declined to wash her hands. If her son had done the same, she would have punished him without mercy. But, her own flesh . . . that was inevitably pure.

Returning to her office, she sat behind her desk and wondered. What a bizarre day! With Lester Graham, she meant. That weird, weird confrontation at the defense . . . the way he’d walked out like that . . . the bizarre offer of “help.”

On some level, if course, it was a good thing. She had long ago decided that he was not intelligent enough to be a real academic. He didn’t deserve a Ph.D. He didn’t have the driving, burning, critical intelligence necessary to be a rigorous scholar. Not like herself, for instance. Why, during her own stint at graduate school, her major professor . . . Dr. Grace Sptter-Cane … had said, “You know, you are the sharpest graduate student I’ve ever had.” She felt warm and pleased at the memory. Dear, dear professor Spitter-Cane.

She gathered up books and papers, her laptop, and prepared to leave. Yet, if it was best that Lester had elected to leave the program, what a strange way to do it. That costume! Those contact lenses! The seeming indifference to his committee’s intellectual superiority. Well, to her intellectual superiority.

That was the important part.

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