Awethology Light
Page 86
DeAnna Quietwater Noriega
Copyright DaAnna Quietwater Noriega
All Rights Reserved
Writer’s Block
“I was ringing up this guy’s books in the bookstore and you wouldn’t believe what he said,” exclaimed Annie, shoving her granny glasses up on her snub nose. She flipped back a wayward strand of hair the color of sandalwood. Widely spaced blue eyes and a pair of faded dungarees gave her the look of a Wisconsin farmer’s daughter — not the fine arts major from California that she was.
“So, tell!” coaxed Dee, a petite, dark haired girl with the high cheekbones of her Chippewa ancestors.
“Well, he was talking about you and Tammy. He’s in your psych class and was complaining about you bringing her.”
“Why would he do that?” Dee said. At her feet lay a large, black Labrador. The dog’s golden amber eyes were fixed on the girl, following her every move.
“Well, he said to his friend that if you kept bringing that huge dog to class, he was going to start bringing his horse. Then his friend said you had to have her there because she’s your guide dog. The guy said, ‘No she wasn’t’ because he’d seen you running down a hall with her coming along behind you on a leash.”
“I wonder when that was.” Dee mused. “I sometimes answer the dorm phone without bothering to put her harness on. I guess I might have run a few steps after a friend inside a building without telling Tammy to guide me. It’s not like I need her help in a familiar setting like I do out on a street. Look, I’ve got to run,” Dee said, lightly sliding slender fingers over the face of a braille watch. “I’ve got English Comp in ten minutes.”
“Who’ve you got?”
“Anderson.” Dee sighed.
Tammy moved to press close to her girl and growled softly.
Annie giggled. “Sounds like Tammy doesn’t like him any more than you do!”
“I don’t dislike him,” said Dee. “It’s the other way around. He seems to hate my writing. I get an upset stomach every time I know he’s returning an assignment. He can be so sarcastic!” She dropped her hand to the handle attached to Tammy’s harness, straightened her shoulders, and stepped away in a swirl of her long skirts and dark chestnut hair that nearly reached to the backs of her knees.
A few minutes later, Tammy wove confidently through the crowd of college freshmen to a desk in the front row. She dove under the attached seat, curling herself into a compact ball. Dee let her backpack slide to the floor and started to sit down on the seat her dog had located for her. To her embarrassment she discovered it was already occupied. Quickly, she attempted to haul Tammy out from under someone’s feet.
“Girl, when I said chair I meant an empty one! Sorry! I think my guide dog wants to improve my social life by making sure I meet more of my classmates. I’m Dee and this devious female in the dog suit is Tammy,” she said.
The boy jumped up to move to the next desk.
“Ah, no problem. I’m Dave Cross.”
“Dave Cross? Aren’t you in my biology class too? I heard you tell my friend Annie you’re premed,” said Dee. “I was going to ask you if you’d be my lab partner. If you could do the dissections and microscope work, I could take all of the notes and keep the lab books up to date.”
“That sounds great. I’ve already started working on becoming a doctor by having handwriting so lousy sometimes even I can’t read it.”
Professor Anderson strode across the front of the room to the far wall. As he talked, his steps kept tempo with the rapid fire of his speech.
“You write like grade school children! These essays are what I would expect from naive prepubescents, not college students.” He tossed all but one paper onto his desk as he swept past it. Pausing in front of Dee, he ripped her paper dramatically in half and threw it contemptuously in the wastebasket before striding off.
“With your disability and minority heritage, I expected better of you, young lady! Where is your passion, your anger, and pain? You are obviously sublimating because no one with your problems could possibly be that full of sunny, optimistic tripe. I want you to forget all of that attention to sentence structure, punctuation, and elements of style bunk and give me truth. This Pollyanna sweetness and light is crap.”
Anderson reached the door again and spun back to resume his diatribe. He was forced to skid to an abrupt halt by a black bulk sprawled directly in his path. The dog hadn’t been there moments before when he had stomped past the little blind girl with her tape recorder. He liked dogs. Guide dogs were supposed to be gentle and friendly. Didn’t Labradors have big, sad brown eyes? This dog stared up at him with the feral, yellow eyes of a wolf. They didn’t look the least bit gentle or friendly.
“Where was I? Oh yes, for your next assignment I want you to read chapter two of my book and write about a painful experience. Make me feel your anguish. Class is dismissed.” He turned his back to exit the room.
A pretty blonde freshman cut him off, skipping ahead of him to block his exit. “Sir, how long does our essay have to be?” she asked.
Before he could snarl at the empty-headed little bimbo, something slammed into the back of his right knee. He staggered to avoid landing unceremoniously on his backside. The damned dog shouldered passed him with her little blind waif in tow. That buffoon who headed the music department had dubbed her the wood nymph. With her long, flowing chestnut hair and childlike face, she did resemble one. It was witches, not wood nymphs, that were supposed to keep familiars. After twenty years of teaching freshman English classes, he usually enjoyed challenging the one or two students who showed promise. But there was something uncanny about how the dog glared back at him each time he tried to push that little girl she guided to reach her potential.
As the two of them sped off down the hall, Dee was torn between wanting to laugh and feeling she should have apologized. Instead, she murmured to her companion, “That’s one way to remove a writer’s block!”
* * *
Professor John Anderson scanned the pages of a typescript before him on his office desk. Frowning in concentration, he read: