Free Black Iris by Leah Raeder Page A

beautiful woman in a toga with one breast bared, or whatever. Robert Graves envisioned the muse as a woman inhabitedby the spirit of a goddess. To love her was to be inspired. To want her was the genesis of art. It blurred the lines between lust and inspiration in a way we’ve always intuitively known they should be blurred, because desire underlies every act of creation. Yes, boys and girls, we’re talking about sex.”
    My phone vibrated against my thigh, and I jumped.
    “A writer does her best writing when she’s driven by desire. This is why romance is the most popular category in fiction, in the entire literary canon. It’s all romance. They were all writing about it, in one way or another. The great works of art, the religious ecstasies—it’s libido, transmuted to something socially acceptable. Why it was socially acceptable to talk about your passion for God but not a fellow human being is an interesting question. Anyway, in this sense, unreliable narration may be trying to tell us about a desire that can’t be expressed directly, but must be distorted, obscured. Perhaps it’s something the narrator doesn’t fully comprehend. Or perhaps it’s something she understands, but doesn’t yet accept. Ms. Keating, what’s in your head right now?”
    Bastard. He’d tricked me into letting my mind drift.
    “I don’t know.”
    “You do know. Close your eyes. What do you see?”
    My head was in a million pieces, in memories, in a moonlit hallway shoved up against a door, in a room where candles threw three shadows against the wall, in a catacomb beneath Umbra where you could scream your heart out without being heard.
    “Nothing.”
    “You didn’t close your eyes.”
    I humored him, if only to get this over with.
    “Please. Indulge us.”
    This dickbag. I didn’t want to tell him I’d spent most of his stupid class fantasizing about skin. Skin against my hands, mymouth. Heat. The sun burning through my eyelids, kindling the blood. A fist curled in the sand. All the grains running out, escaping. I kept curling it tighter, trying not to let go, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t hold on.
    My eyes opened. The room was dazzlingly bright. I’d said all of that aloud.
    “Interesting.” Frawley cocked an eyebrow. “Loss of love is an eternal theme. You may want to explore its subtleties in your work, Ms. Keating. Mr. Teitsch.”
    He moved away, leaving me shivering and forgotten in the light.
    “Close your eyes, Mr. Teitsch.”
    My hands perched on my knees, crooked as claws.
    The phone.
    One notification: photo with text message. As I looked at it the rest of the room dimmed out like in a movie, a vignette fading in around the screen.
    The photo wasn’t the shock. It was tamer than I’d expected. But I could not take my eyes from the words.
    My mind was consumed with a single thought.
    Run.
    At the end of class I darted out the door, sprinting by the time I reached the elevators. I ducked into the stairwell, skipped down three steps at a time in a vaguely guided fall. On the ground floor I hurtled into winter air and ran flat-out along the black granite beach, across the commons where the grass was dull silver and dead gold, up the bridge over Lake Shore Drive and down into the city, banging people’s elbows and hips in my haste and never looking back. It began to rain. My soles slipped on slick asphalt. My lungs burned like an internal combustion engine. At the Red Line station I cut ahead of someone and jumped a turnstile. Shouts rose behind me. I rammed through the crowd on the platform, searching.Grabbed a blonde’s shoulder and spun her around: a stranger. Every face was wrong. Too late.
    At the railing a girl stared down into the street, watching rain fall on the red and black lacquer of Chinatown, the twin pagodas in the distance. She wore a beanie, so I’d missed her at first, but I knew the sun-gold hair framing that face.
    I walked up as a train arrived and she didn’t turn around. She’d been