Free The Divinity Student by Michael Cisco

along a seam, dilating without tearing to let him into the walls. The darkness grows transparent by degrees, and then he can see two candles burning on a tiny shelf set high above him. They burn before a small sepia photograph of a blank-faced woman with clear eyes, hanging on the wall, and beneath the shelf Mr Woodwind lies, sternly sleeping, hands folded on his chest, leaning against an upright board.
    Will he wake up? The Divinity Student creeps forward, but again comes the rattling of coins, very near. Then he sees Miss Woodwind, sitting smiling beside a card table smoothly set with a white cloth, with a scales and a cashbox. A Chinese lantern sheds red light down over its tassels, makes her white dress glow red. To him it seems as if a veil or shadow lay between them, he can see her distinctly and yet she is vague as a blurred photograph. She extends her hand to him.
    He waves his hands. “What?”
    “Your notebook!” she says with a grin, and light flickers across her features, kaleidoscoping all colors from her lips and eyes, her temples, cheek’s hollow, and beneath her chin.
    He hands it over, coming closer, into her fragrance, and he can see the perfume in a glassy fog around her. Miss Woodwind lays the notebook smartly on the balance. In a few moments she efficiently tallies the new weight of the book and compares it to the old, reckoning how many words he has collected by weight, and calculates his pay on a chart. She counts out seven heavy gold wheels from the cashbox and extends them, cupping the money on her fingertips, so that as she drops them into his palm, her nails brush his skin just barely, only just touching him. This is all she has to do. Now he won’t forget her looking up at him through the gleam of the gold, nor the touch of her hand. She smiles at him, pleased.
    Another wrong turn, he looks around in anguish, lost. The streets weave sometimes changing direction; he’s recognizing the buildings, but the streets don’t match. The Divinity Student is following the train tracks, another passing in a blast of diesel pushing hot air and thick flakes of dust before it, electricity snapping at the synapses. These trains run aboveground, their tunnels burrow through buildings, not earth, roaring through restaurants, hotels, private homes, churches, libraries, hospitals. The Divinity Student is staggering, disoriented, sweating in the wake of the trains, thinking only that he wants to sit down with her at the table and watch her filling columns of words; he’ll gladly be a mirror-glass, simply to sit by her and watch, bathed in her cool breath; or a lens for her to see through, so that he could be frosted with the rays that beam from her eyes, and these ideas push everything else out of the way. Dimmed and confused, he boards the train.
    Under him his seat is rocking, only lulling him further into reverie, they plunge into the bowels of some public building, lamps streak by in horizontal bars of light, a fetid smell creeps damply through the car vents, and through his faint reflection in the window he can see the tunnel walls falling away into nothing on either side, rusted parallel tracks lying brown on lifeless gray earth, rancid pools, and occasional lamplit islands, a few men in construction uniforms lying idle.
    He rides for a long time, people pass through the car, men in suits, lictors, old women. Some boys horsing around.
    Fragments, incomplete ideas, but he’s sobering a little. They crash out into sunlight again, the train shrieks and complains—melancholy sighing of old metal—and stop at a tiled station with slanting roof of clouded glass. The doors hiss and roll open.
    A hand seizes his arm and drags him out through the doors, before he can react they shut behind him and the train drags out into the street sending a car skidding into a heap of trash cans to avoid it. The Divinity Student turns and finds himself alone on the platform, but he recognizes the station now. Outside, he can