Free A Moveable Famine by John Skoyles

was studying for his doctoral exam, and sat in an armchair surrounded by books, broken toothpicks and stained coffee cups. One evening I visited him after he had read Middlemarch in a day. He couldn’t remember the main character’s name.
    “I’ve reached a point of diminishing returns,” he said. “Let’s get something to eat.” We left for Hamburg Inn No. 3.
    Pryor sat at a table by himself, inviting us over, his red eyes showing another fight with Wendy. Our banter couldn’t shake the sadness from his face. We all ordered the meatloaf special. While we waited, a shadowy ectomorph appeared at the open door, hesitant, stepping in and stepping out, as if the floor were a burning pan. Shielding his eyes, though it was not bright, he charged inside.
    “Mitch!” Pryor called.
    Ridge asked, “What is Lawson doing at Hamburg Inn No. 3?”
    Lawson, dressed in a silver houndstooth coat with epaulets and a belt around the back, approached our table, all smiles for a change. He asked if he could join us, saying his wife was out of town visiting her mother. Pryor told him about the special and he ordered it, asking the waitress to pour the gravy on top of his fries. The three of us locked eyes at this first instance of inelegance. He looked around in wonder, as uncomfortable with the Inn as it was with him, as we were with him, as he seemed with us, and with his life, a night in an uncomfortable inn, Hamburg Inn No. 3.
    Ridge got him on the subject of his hobby, gambling. He told us of a board game, “Win, Place & Show,” which he called the greatest game ever. He said that when Mark Strand visited, it stayed on his dining room table for days. We all wanted a good marriage, a longtime poet-friend, a dining room table, and a leisurely pastime. We ate quickly, hungrily, while Lawson fiddled with his plate, handling his fork like a pen. He lined the canned peas into rows, mashing some of them with a loud tick. When he had taken a few bites of the meatloaf and eaten most of the sopped fries, he looked at his watch, said goodbye and settled with the cashier.
    As soon as he left, Pryor pointed to his plate. “Did you see that? He smashed one out of three peas!”
    Ridge and I looked at the row of dots.
    “He did!” Pryor pulled Lawson’s plate toward him. “He crushed every third pea. Two unstressed, one stressed. Dactyls!”
    When we asked for the check, we found Lawson had paid.
    Dan Cook parked in front of the restaurant and came toward us, head down, the leather heels of his black boots clicking. He lifted his chin from his ascot and took Ridge aside, his arm circling the shoulder of Ridge’s peacoat, which was dappled with cat hair. Ridge turned to us, said that they were going to meet a couple of girls, and they drove off.
    So we spent our days, literally scanning the plate of our teacher in Hamburg Inn No. 3, seeing the world madly in stresses and unstresses.
    On Black Tuesday, Ridge came to my door to tell me I was again passed over.
    “I hate to tell you, but they gave Barkhausen a TA.”
    “You’re kidding,” I said.
    “They think he’s original.”
    “He is that,” I said.
    “I tried to point out that his stuff is word salad, but Harvey and Lawson really like it.”
    “Did you see that new poem of his, where he puts a ‘chug of wine’ on the table?” I said.
    “I know,” Ridge said. “And there was one in the manuscript about fucking a woman outside a strip club, in the ‘porking lot.’ Lawson wrote in the margin, Streetwise wordplay .”
    Ridge leaned against the doorframe and said he dropped by so I wouldn’t learn the bad news around town. I said I would meet him later that night.
    After he left, I imagined Barkhausen misusing words in his class. He had recently complimented Pryor on his rigorous writing schedule, praising his “wheel power.” I was not as good a writer as many of the others, and Barkhausen did have a rough glamour. I understood the decision and, in some ways, I was