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.