She felt a promising sensation reach for her core and opened her dark eyes with soft anticipation. She found his blue eyes not gazing into hers but into the upper corner of the room, up over her left shoulder, with a look of something like boredom mixed with purposeful indifference. All sensation fled. Later, alone, she sometimes wondered if it would have been better to simply have kept her eyes closed. Beate Sigriddaughter, www.sigriddaughter.net, lives in Silver City, New Mexico (Land of Enchantment), where she was poet laureate from 2017 to 2019. Her poetry and short prose are widely published in literary magazines. Recent book publications include a poetry collection, Wild Flowers and a novel, Soleil Madera.

Her English teacher called her Mousy, perhaps because she often wore a wooden mouse pin with red rhinestone eyes and a thin leather strip for a tail. She didn’t mind. The pin had been her mother’s idea of adorable. There was a lot of confusion in those days. Roman soldiers didn’t particularly float her boat, for instance. All the same, she wrote a story about two of them once, and to her enormous surprise, her teacher, a former Jesuit priest, now happily married to a former nun and teaching at her Lutheran all-girls school, was so impressed with her story, he asked if he could have it. She was flattered and said of course and handed over her exercise book, almost empty otherwise. Since she wasn’t interested in Roman soldiers in the first place and soon couldn’t remember what she had written, she was hardly going to miss the story. Not long afterwards, the school decided to let the teacher go. Some of his views were considered too radical for an all-girls school. This in …