Papa Hemingway, Help Me

Open: Journal of Arts and Letters/April 6, 2024

A man can be destroyed but not defeated. 

I arrived early because I didn’t want to see anyone, even old Phil, the janitor. The hall stretched, long and daunting, the walls surveyed me with hundreds of eyes. Bad knees creaking, I pressed on, struggled to find my own classroom door, almost unrecognizable, decorated with Shakespearean insults: How now, you gleeking, flapmouthed, footlicker.