…sitting in her chair, well it’s not really hers, but the way her left ankle, embraced by an over fluffed cotton sock, flirts with the poorly waxed front left post and her creamy right leg, somehow finding a way to glisten and glow like the sparkles of a setting sun on the Atlantic despite lying underneath cheaply manufactured and cheaply installed florescent lights, caresses the ill-sanded front rim of the seat as her right heel, peek-a-booing between the heel of her sandal and the strap confining her ankle, toys seductively with the hardened gum and dried snot many failed to noticed and few left behind, forces the oak structure to succumb into her possession, the boys, too, succumb to the forty or so cherry-brown hairs that are out of place because she has placed a softly-chewed red pencil, with enough lead life so that several boys could write banal poems about her with it, underneath the upper flap of her outer ear as the boys yearn for the stilled oscillating fan’s pin to be pushed down so that the blades could spin towards a greater arc and push air in her direction and give those freed-yet-still-prisoned hairs a greater freedom, which in turn would only promote deeper, sicker, more perverse, and more obsessive thoughts about her to cultivate in the isolated, deserted, autophobic minds of the voyeuristic desires every phallic creature whose natural gander grazes a gaze upon her becomes, each waiting for his chance to be asked for an extra sheet of paper or an eraser or an answer to a question she doesn’t have herself, giving one a chance at courtship or seduction or a pathetic whimpering of hi, the most laconic expression of unrequited love, all the while the boys wondering why she wore the baby blue blouse today, which she hasn’t worn in over six weeks, silently yet collectively coming to conclusions that it had been kicked under the bed or misplaced in her sister’s room until their mother finally made them clean their bedrooms, or that a friend had forgotten she had borrowed it until her mother made a similar demand, and were wondering why she had the top two buttons opened, instead of the usual one she wore undone on blouses such as this, and each concluding from this that she’s trying to get his attention and affection, giving him another opportunity at courtship, or seduction, or a hi, and then each reminding himself that it isn’t the way her white bra ever-so-slightly slips through the threading of her blouse, almost becoming one with the pattern several light blue, a few white, and maybe one or two (or three or four) violet threads make, nor the way her jeans hug her ass yet still hid the bulge of her out-of-date chunky cell phone her father refuses to upgrade for “better service” (which he knows is girl-talk for unlimited text messaging), nor the way she wears those thick-framed glasses, white ones no less, on days when she would indubitably lose in the irritation and aggravation battle contacts often declare, nor the way she sneezes or yawns or stretches her arms or pauses to think about the previous night that always causes their hearts to sweat in her presence and their brains to palpitate in memory and dream, but the way her left ankle sometimes flirts with the poorly waxed front left post and the forty or so cherry-brown hairs that are sometimes out of place…

– Ryan Dunham