Remaining Time

The clock ticks, his heart beats. The rhythms syncopate. He clicks his pen once, twice, three times, thrumming his free hand on the desk top. The girl in front of him gives a tiny kitten cough and whispers “excuse me” in her squeaky-clean voice. He sighs and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes until he sees neon blobs of color, which mercifully erase the motif of exam bubbles, not yet filled in.

At the front of the room, the proctor puts her glasses on and examines her nails. She’s wearing plaid and her glasses sit on the end of her nose, each corner dripping a long gold chain, which twists around to the back of her wrinkled neck, a cold embrace.

His stomach growls, loud enough to intimidate a grizzly bear and he looks around at the rest of the room, wondering if they’d heard or whether they were deaf, in their test-taking bubbles.

The guy at the front of the room, the one wearing an Albert Einstein t-shirt, scratches hard at his dandruffy head, fingers savage. The girl behind him pulls her paper as far away as possible. The proctor yawns.

From the back row, the far corner, he can see all of them, see them writing and rewriting essay questions, see them realizing slowly that their last group of multiple choice answers were offset by one, see them furtively calculating on the side of their page that if they skipped the essay they would, indeed, fail.

His essay is finished, like the pen had moved of its own accord, constructing arguments and producing details and dates from thin air. Now the thousand empty bubbles float before him and he groans, glancing at the sunshine outside, and forces his pen to the paper, like repelling magnets.