The Professor and the Green-Eyed Girl

Pieces:

Whenever he doesn’t have a subject to consume his thoughts and make him walk around with a dreamy look on his face that makes people think he’s fallen in love, or scowl in concentration and never hear a word spoken around him, he gets sick. Mucus fills his chest and he develops a cough that sounds like an engine trying to start in the dead of winter. When he cuts his finger on the page of a book or nicks his chin while shaving the wound refuses to heal. He went to the doctor when this first started happening, sure he had diabetes or tuberculosis or cancer. They took his blood and ran some tests and sent him home with a tube of antibiotic ointment and a package of menthol throat lozenges.


He likes to stare at the rings of mushrooms growing in his backyard, imagining the complex tangle of vines that connect them together underground. There is something of magic in circles. Nearly every civilization has had some superstition or belief about the power of a circle. The symbol of infinity, the Gnostic serpent, the cycles of earth and moon, the pentacle of birth the rebirth, Stonehenge, the spiral of the womb, a shell, a fingerprint.


He is startled into looking at her eyes. They’re the same yellow-green of her sweater, which is all lumpy and pilled like it was knit by an ancient relative with arthritis and worn every day for the past ten years. The leaves of the miniature maple when it is overcast in June. That’s what color her eyes are.
“Nice sweater.” His voice sounds like a rusty flaking shovel. “It matches your eyes.” He is surprised that he’s said this. “Did you make it?”
She shakes her head no, looks at him out of those wide green eyes. He doesn’t know that she is as startled as he is.
“I’m wearing two pairs of pants” she says quickly.
He nods his head curtly and coughs and sputters for a second. Then the engine turns over and he resumes his lecture on German symbolism.

That night he uses too much toothpaste when he brushes his teeth. White foam gathers in the corners of his smile and his tongue has a big round raw spot from the strength of the spearmint.