My Fickle Flesh by Christopher Allen

He was a sprawl  legs open like a peace sign. I'd want to talk to him  look him in the eye  and then I wouldn't. I chatted with the elderly woman next to him a non-trad auditing Shakespeare “for very personal reasons " but never to him. Not directly. I memorized the seams of his sand-washed jeans  from the frayed and grimy hems to the bulge of his wallet in his front left pocket  fading white like the negative of a piece of whole-wheat toast.

He spoke only twice. Both times I stared at his flip flops  at his toes. Long but not apelike. Plump  healthy looking and clean. A bit hairy but again: not apelike. He smelled like Downy Rich&Creamy I'm guessing but I'd bet a twenty I'm right as he compared the characters in King Lear to those in Modern Family with finesse. Guessing again. I hadn't read it; I just nodded a lot at my shoes and said  "Great point."His paper." The Tempest as a Star Trek Episode got an A++ from the professor  who came in full Trekky regalia to read it to the class in the jerky  wooden voice of Captain Kirk.

Handing in my final paper  I told Betty or Marge or Nancy that I'd enjoyed her uniquely mature perspective on "the larger-than-Shakespeare tragedies of growing old in real life " as she'd put it  and then added loudly  because I could feel his heat behind me. “And how 'bout that Trekky paper? That was amazing  just beamed me right up!" When I turned to get a good look at those eyes  he was gone and the lights in the room were out.