Free Forty Rooms by Olga Grushin

and I was aware that there was no ground under my feet. I felt queasy, and wanted to wake up.
    “Alternatively . . .” I said, and my voice was hoarse—these were the first words I had spoken since we had abandoned the safety of my cubicle. “Alternatively, one could just marry an understanding man of means and hire a nanny.”
    As soon as I spoke, his hand on my neck grew heavy and inert, as though made of marble, and the swirling lights guttered as in a gust of wind, and went out. Blackness crashed upon me, suffocating and enormous, but I had no time to feel frightened before the electric lamps whirred to an abrupt glare. Blinded, I shut my eyes. When I opened them, I expected him to be gone, but he was still there, looking down upon me as I sat at my desk—and I was shocked to see his face, for it was not as before, not handsome and hard and leering, but tranquil and beautiful, filled with a gentle radiance of autumn sunlight and, also, an odd kind of sadness.
    Unable to sustain his gaze, I lowered my eyes to the floor.
    “You aren’t barefoot tonight,” I mumbled, to hide my confusion.
    “There was a notice on the library door,” he said flatly. “‘Shoesand shirts required.’ And don’t start thinking about that boy’s shirt again, or one day you may find yourself laundering it.”
    I laughed, knowing full well that this time I was truly alone, and raised my eyes again, to discover that two or three books had fallen off my desk onto the floor; I must have pushed them with my elbow while dozing, and the crash had woken me up. I hunted in my overflowing bag for a compact mirror to check my face for any signs of drool, just in case anyone wandered by, and marveled at the unsought wealth of ideas that had sprung up in my mind fully formed, out of nowhere, while I had slept. The Cycle of Memory, I would call these new poems. There would be one about a blind girl who lived in the library and summoned ghosts of her favorite poets to life every night; and another about a compendium of immortality carelessly updated by an angel who kept drifting off to sleep in the softness of his cloud and forgetting to jot down a name or two; and yet another about a peasant in some desert discovering the missing manuscript of all of Sappho’s masterpieces—this one would weave in and out of Sappho’s lines, real and imagined, as the fellah would stumble and mumble over them before tearing the papyrus into strips to bind his aching feet—oh, and maybe one about a woman creating a marvelous, perfect poem about each child she had refused to have, though on second thought, no, I knew nothing about children . . . So, then, how about a Muse of Apollo—I would make her Clio, the Muse of History—who fell in love and renounced being a Muse for a spell, causing entire civilizations to be obliterated in human memory while her love affair went on—and more, and more, and more . . .
    I felt awake and young and exhilaratingly happy.

8. Boyfriend’s Bedroom
    The First English Poem, Written at the Age of Nineteen
    “And while the rats were having sex in their cage,” the girl shouted over the noise, “this guy next to me actually stood up to see better. Can you imagine? And Professor Roberts noticed him and said, in front of everyone—” The music took off anew, a galloping folk tune this time, and a cluster of boys across the room roared and linked their arms and stomped about, vigorously throwing their legs up in the air, so the end of her sentence was drowned out. I watched her eyes widen with excitement in the eyeholes of her feathered mask. She leaned closer. “. . . so intense, you know!”
    “I’m supposed to take it next semester,” I shouted back, “but I’m not sure—”
    “Ah, here you are!” Lisa cried, elbowing her way through the dancers. “What are you still doing with your old drink? I brought you a new one.”
    I squinted into the plastic cup she was holding out.
    “It’s green,” I