Free The Lesson by Jesse Ball

out, they said, completely disregarding the glue factory scenario.
    —If you’ll pardon me, said Stan’s mother to Loring.
    She took up an atlas that was leaned against the wall and drove the children out with furious blows. She really was quite strong, you know.
    When the children were gone, she came back.
    —They are always after me, she said.
    —It is true in my experience, said Loring, that they want to be near you. Who can say why.
    —We will be over here! came a shout from outside.
    A quick look into the distance would have made clear that the children were balanced on several lightpoles. How they had climbed them is unknown. In fact, neither woman looked out the door. Instead, they were concluding their business.
    —I will bring him tomorrow.
    Loring nodded.

That Evening by the Light of a Candle
    Loring sat remembering things. She remembered an orange sail that had often been on certain boats. This sail had gone out of use. It was now no longer to be found. Although once it had been so common that all recognized it by sight, now there was not even a single one in existence. It had been many years since she had last looked out to sea, and found there, darting above the horizon, that particular cloth, angle, texture.
    Next she thought of the weather, and how it seemed to be true that everyone felt weather was different during childhood. Of course, it couldn’t be true. She thought of her own childhood, and of the weather then, and discovered that she too felt the weather was different. Although, of course, she thought, I lived in a different place. Most everyone ends up in a different place from the place of their childhood, and so it makes sense that the weather would be different. But then she thought, perhaps that’s not true. Many people stay in the same place.
    Once, she said to herself, there was that storm at the zoo. We had gone to the zoo, and torrential rains came. The zoo had just been built that year, and they hadn’t known much about zoo-building, and certainly not about flooding, for all the cages began to flood when the rain came on. Such a rain, not in all the remaining years have I seen its like. She thought about how she and her father had sheltered under a tree and had watched the animals drowning. She had cried and cried. Her father had not covered her face. Rather, he pointed out how sad it was.
    To come all this way, he had said, and then die in a cage.
    That had been the first public photograph of Loring. A photographer had taken it just as she and her father left the zoo, the rain abating. Behind them a ruined, broken landscape, with dead animals here and there. And she, dressed in a blue smock with her single braid wound tight about her neck. Of course, in the photograph, the smock was not blue.

The Fourth Visit
    —And now we are going to try something, said Loring.
    The two were in the bedroom, where they hadn’t gone before.
    —And now we are going to try something. Please, go, stand there by the window.
    Stan went and stood by the window. A light fell now on the front of his face and shoulders.
    —Would you mind, she said, putting on this jacket?
    It was one of these very light jackets that aren’t really for wearing outdoors, and have buttons like those on a shirt. This one was grey.
    —All right, he said. Is this for me?
    He put the jacket on. It fit quite well.
    —It is, she said.
    —Thank you.
    Loring watched him there a moment.
    —Keep looking out the window, she said. Don’t turn around.
    She was wearing unusual clothing: a Chinese style shirt that buttoned on one side, in muted but iridescent green like a fish seen in muddy water; a pair of broad khaki pants; and her hair was tied up in a kerchief. The matter is confused, but becomes clear when one sees the photograph that she then took out of her pocket. In it, she, a younger woman, is wearing the same clothing, the Chinese shirt, the pants, the kerchief. She is standing by the window of a bedroom, beside a man who