After giving the issue the thought it deserved, he concluded the only really possible options were 1) an angry text, but right away (it was the premediated angry text that came off truly creepy, impossible ever to apologize for); 2) no reply; 3) days later, a significant text, measured and insightful, thorough, reparative even, operating in any case on a higher plane than that of the problem’s creation (to paraphrase Einstein). When he had sent, instead, a little bit of everything. It was complex, this new regime, its politics, rules. Liability, as in so many other arenas of American life, was the motor. He had had no feelings particularly about going back to school in his middle thirties, a means to an end and conveniently timed with an awful recession nationally as well as his own next steps. He had not profoundly thought about—for it had not occurred to him—socialization there. Henry, as a matter of habit and affinity, focused on his work—a luxury, as he appreciated, and a burden, that too. Of course he had expected to make friends—real peers, perhaps not, but among people with common interests, very young people included, he would have plenty to talk about, and as they adjourned into the darkening New England evening after a workshop, after a visiting professor’s lecture, they’d hash it out certainly over a beer or two; there were good local breweries in this part of the country, charming bars, haunts that were not however necessarily the most expensive. He might treat. If he was honest he had dreamed the younger students, many of them fresh out of college, would look up to him. And he would model—what? Well, many things. And yet regarding Henry’s record of publishing his writing, it became grounds for amazement that to many of his classmates this seemed rather an indictment, tryhard. They fancied, with his evident connections, by the stage of life he’d reached, they’d have done—were going to be doing—better for themselves. They took the parity of their selection in a class with him as a sign of greater innate talent, anointment on its basis; they had gotten there by not doing anything or written, some of them, three stories in their lives. A hundred poems in the summer of the loss of their virginity.

So there was something touching in it, them. In them and their predicament. Something it took courage to resist—for courage was, sometimes, requisite, not to be touched or moved to action that was inappropriate by the predicaments of others. And that was how Henry had ended up here—not in the program but, hardly ten days after they’d all received diplomas, alone at his desk in the darkening evening. And quite alone spiritually. Yes—that was the place he was in.

Was it so bad a place? The summer air held a tingle. Across the street, outside his window, was a medical facility, and as Henry’s gaze settled in to rest upon the U-shaped parking lot the movement of a person—a darker shadow among shadows—captured, quite without Henry’s participation, his attention. This person, socle for an enormous, irregularly filled trash bag—as with, but it was the wrong season, dead leaves—made their clumsy way over to the Dumpster, not a public Dumpster, and lifting its lid with one hand used the other—truly, the bag was far from heavy—to make their deposit. Testing, pressing. And though this were impossible Henry felt, then, that he could hear or almost, in a way he heard—a way more like feeling than like hearing and brought about by mysteries of physics, electrostatic properties inhering in that humid night—the lid’s thud. Its reverberating bang.

Which was what he liked about humiliation—being flung open to the universe, a temporary sensitive.

He had noticed in her early an openness to reinforcement, need. It was shameful his mind went there—maybe. He thought perhaps that she had lost a parent—this was common among the young poets. While they all produced bad work, Henry was interested to observe that, where the fiction writers’ failures were failures mainly of taste, the poets’ were failures of character. Most frequent was a kind of deadly narcissism that reliably would make the whole hermetic in a way seeming truly unfixable, uneducable. Indeed, their errors (Henry had gotten in for prose) were worse. To this type of error she was not, he saw, immune. It added in her case interestingly to a glittering store of charms—he was imaginative, a novelist. And to him it could be charming how she did not think it would be obvious her words were chosen randomly. The oversight was charming. They were not chosen, for example, on the basis of their sound. And yet Henry had been, quite unexpectedly, impressed—by a strangeness of syntax she was unafraid, wholly, to engage, bold in the face of; by the unusual use she made of syntax to send your readerly attention very precisely, as you realized only too late, defenseless, to a surprising spot each time, controlling where in each line your eye stayed. But this was not how Henry had described her poetry to her in his letters, which were required as homework. A pure lyricism, he had written. The purest. Feeling her uncurl, then, in his direction, slightly. That congeals into eddies. Your own tongue.

The evidence was subtle, but he felt their connection building. He thought there was between them something like an understanding they were two iconoclasts. He could be a bit rough-and-tumble, in the workshop; he took things seriously, and he could tell that, in contrast to their other young classmates, she didn’t mind but rather liked his manner, focus, gusto. He noticed details about her. He was touched to see she kept her gloves on, in winter—simple wool gloves, five-dollar gloves in bright colors—as he developed inwardly, for fun he guessed, the theory or hypothesis this was to keep her hands as soft, as slim as possible; she was a young trans woman, very gifted physically—there would be no need for facial feminization surgery—but he supposed the ravages of aging were threatening in special ways to her. It was noble, very ladylike he thought, this fight that she put up. Eventually he found out somehow it was eczema, the reason for the gloves. She had flashing bright-blue eyes. She was, he hoped this didn’t bother her, a bit swarthy. Unlike Henry, who couldn’t grow a beard. Henry had a car. And though he searched himself he could not say with certainty what made him, as it stalled one day all around them, glance her way, over at his passenger—who, to his astonishment, was staring back. As the school’s marching band, bristled edges of their uniforms brushing up against his very headlights almost, made their traversal. Single file, their descent, as a trail of ants down to the football field after a single crumb, had just begun. She touched his arm.

He took out, again, his phone to open up, against his better judgment, the texting application, scrolling back through what he’d sent to read the last from her, her last, a text that had, before he’d had the chance to process or accommodate the insult, which was deep, gifted him the strongest sense of possibility, of openness, connection, for a moment—

A fleeting moment—

Was there any other kind—

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Jacqueline Feldman is a writer whose first books, On Your Feet and Precarious Lease, will be released this year. Twitter: @jacquefeld