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Auxiliary, Supplementary, Inessential

27 Aug, 2024
Auxiliary, Supplementary, Inessential

The two newer adjuncts are sharing their teaching dreams. I look up, smile, and go back to my notebook, pretending I am writing something important.

It’s not that I haven’t written about teaching dreams before. There was even one that I sold to a little horror magazine years ago. Only lightly fictionalized, that one, if fictionalizing is even what you can call the process of filling lacunae in a recalled dream so it reads as a gapless thing.

Gapless, I write in my notebook and doodle spirals all around the word. There’s only me and the newer adjuncts in the faculty room now, and it’s cold in here. I could sleep if there wasn’t a professional development meeting about to start. I love this smelly little room.

In the story I sold to the magazine, the teacher was taken over by a mindless parasitic thing that stole her body. Other starts didn’t become stories. One was of a final exam I had not written, that I tried to make up and write on the board on the spot, the students tensed before me with their sharpened pencils raised. Ready, I thought, to hurl them into me.

The classrooms L-shaped or U-shaped so that you could not see the students at either end and when you were serving some of them, the others revolted, so desperate for your eyes on them, so desperate to smell your breath ...

There are more people in the room now, and somehow the conversation has infected them so that all of them speak of their teaching dreams (none so vivid as my own). The smallest part of my own dreams I express here in the faculty room among our snacks of carrots and of hummus and pita, artichoke-spinach dip, and grapes. So sleep-sick and red-eyed, all of us, because we care so very much. Because we give of ourselves.

Taste of my flesh, I think, taste of my vegetables and dips.

I speak some part of a dream as we wait for the rest of our colleagues. Icebreaking, I write as I speak, and draw skulls all around it. I speak of clear plastic tunnels we must climb through on our way from classroom to classroom in the dreams, how we must press and slide against each other in these intestinal passageways.

This is starting to feel a little dangerous, I think, with dread and glee. Boldly I crunch someone’s cookie, a dry and vegan cookie from their home. I come down wrong on a bad molar and feel the crack, the icy pressure of bone shards. My teeth are bad on one side and worse on the other, no health insurance because that is for the full-times though there aren’t any full-times anymore.

We adjuncts teach three classes one semester and four the next, which makes seven-eighths of full time. Though full-time does not exist, they are talking about making it five and five so that then part-time could be four and five. The tenures teach only two and one or two and three to leave time for their crucial research, but there aren’t many tenures left and the ones who are left, you look at them and they look away. Except now, with this talk of dreams, the sallow tenure sitting here in our group does not quite look away, not quite. She’s listening for something, listening closely to me. I feel it.

I cannot shut up. I speak of my dreams with the dread and glee coming up closer to my skin, burning my face. I am not looking down at my notebook now—I look at the colleagues, but the flush of it has gone all the way into my eyes. I see nothing.

After the icebreaker, snacks and meeting and everything, when we are supposed to go sit in our cars and grade papers until class, the tenure asks me—me!—to come to her office. Her overheated office smelling of Trader Joe’s lemon lotion and moldy old books. She asks me, and I go.

Am I being let go? I wonder, but no, surely they do that in late August before classes start. The day before classes start, I imagine, they send you a text. Or not. You just show up for your class all bleary-eyed from finalizing the syllabus and there’s some other person teaching. You run toward the department office to see if there’s been some mistake and a security guard tackles you on the way, hurls you onto the sidewalk.

I remember standing at the copier making my hundreds of pages of syllabi when a tenure came to the doorway with her papers, saw me, sighed heavily and said Aw, shit before trudging back to her office. Hogging the copier when she had just that one little thing to print for her nine or ten students, how rude of me.

Maybe their research is not so crucial after all, I sometimes wonder, but no, that’s too unkind.

I remember a male tenure, during a department meeting, reasoning out why the full-times each ought to have only four-tenths instead of four-eighths of a vote in department matters. My, wasn’t he passionate, eloquent. This was back when there were full-times here. Oh, how many years ago was that?

“An opportunity,” this tenure whispers now, looking deep into my eyes. Mine. Hers are green and gold. I love her for seeing me.

“An opportunity? For me?” I say all breathless.

“Experimental, but really promising,” she says, passing a brochure across the desk. “I think you’d be perfect.”

But this can’t be, I’m thinking, barely able to focus on the brochure. More classes? A new program? Heart about to burst. Full time? Rainbows and fireworks strobe in my mind, and dollar signs, a shiny new car, a bright white dental implant in a smiling dentist’s fingers like a diamond ring, but then it all recedes with her next words.

“The programs are separate. Seven-eighths time here—or nine-tenths once our proposal goes through—and up to seven-eighths time there, Maris. No benefits, of course, but you’d make more and who knows ... if it all works out ...


I lie in bed thinking I ought not to have been so rude. It was unexpected, that was all.

“A month’s pay?” I asked the silver-haired lady in the program office, all my anger and bafflement unrestrained. “How can that be?”

She said, “What does parking cost, in the other program?”

The building was only a stone’s throw from campus, but it seemed another country. Everything so vague and echoey. I figured in my head and said, “Parking costs two weeks’ pay, a little less.”

She shrugged.

Two weeks for just a parking space, and here she was offering a bed for only twice that. More than a bed, too: a nice little locker, a shower down the hall. Oh, I’d been ungrateful.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, signing the form, and she only kept that disgusted look on her face like she thought I wasn’t sorry at all, but I was. I am sorry still, lying here fretting about it.

“Five minutes to sleep cycle— put away devices, lights on,” says a voice in the wall behind the bed. My devices are all in the locker already. I am a rule follower.

A researcher and assistant come in. The assistant administers the shot with the researcher directing. A cabinet behind the bed opens and red-and-blue cords and tubes tumble out, just barely in my line of sight. One of the people hooks me up, but by then I am only half aware. The lights go off and they are silhouettes going out the door.

“Lights out,” says the voice from the wall, some long time later.

I stretch into the dream, wake into the dream.


Sitting at a conference table in a blurred and shapeless room, I begin in a freeze, in panic. The faces hover in and out like the earliest memories of childhood, leering faces over your crib. For a second I am sure I am in a crib, but then a husky-voiced woman says, “She’s stabilizing. She’s doing fine.” The woman’s sitting close like people used to do sometimes, years ago. She rubs my back in strong slow strokes. Her face is bright and friendly, her curly hair blurring away into the room. “I’m your mentor, Judy. Just stay here. Don’t slip away.”

“Where are we?” I say, and my voice echoes. The other faces around the table are too far away to see.

“Orientation,” says Judy.

“The room,” I gasp. She’s cloyingly close, and everything else too far away. There’s not enough air.

“I think it’s a composite of what we all expect to see,” she says, looking around. “Some things are like that here. Don’t worry.” She has her arm around my shoulder, squeezes me in toward her.

The meeting goes on. I do not understand what people say. Sometimes I ask Judy, but she only hushes me and smiles again. From far across the table, I make out the word “accreditation.”

A woman rushes in, says we’re about to miss the Orientation Parade, but the meeting goes on. I feel the tension at that, everyone must. They’re missing the parade, but they keep droning on. They cannot stop themselves.

Finally people begin gathering things left on the table. Someone rises.

“And let’s not forget Maris, our new adjunct,” Judy says, and they drop their things again to clap. A standing ovation, short but enthusiastic. Each face comes clear on their way out the door, and each one shakes my hand in that warm way people used to, years ago.

“We’re all adjuncts here,” says Judy as we follow them down the hall. She’s holding my hand.

At the real college’s orientation day, we hear speeches by administrators and pick up a sack lunch to eat in the quad, but here where money is no object, the entertainment’s far finer. A feast of succulent meats, fruits, and cakes is piled high on a long table. Live music and decorated horses. Tiny parade floats bloat and then hover up into the sky. Oh, it’s that kind of parade!

“Let’s go,” says Judy, leading me into a basket, and soon we are floating over the campus and over a shimmering city, then canyons, desert, mountains.


I wake, shower, go to morning classes, grade, and eat stale crackers in my car before afternoon classes. It’s seven o’clock when I get to my apartment to pack a change of clothes and watch a little Netflix before I have to get back to the bed-cubicle for lights out. Halfway through the movie I remember tomorrow’s night class, so I pack up another change of clothes. There won’t be time to come home at all tomorrow. It will be Thursday before I can return. I’m glad I never got a cat after all.

I look back on the apartment with nostalgia, like it’s already gone. My bookcases with all their yellow “Used” stickers from the campus bookstore, family photo albums unopened for years, my sunken-in spot before the television. One philodendron sits on the kitchen sill, already drooping.


On Zoom, Judy’s curls blur into the background just like they do in our dreams—or in our late-night shifts, as she says I should call them. I Zoom, grade, and watch Netflix sprawled on my cubicle-bed between classes now. I’ve gathered a new mini-fridge and the coffee maker from home, as well as a stack of my best school clothes.

“Still keeping the apartment, though? I really don’t think you need to,” says Judy.

We love you. Don’t you love us? is how she put it during our shift last night. Don’t you love our students?

“The students are wonderful. It isn’t that,” I say. I don’t know if they’re wonderful—it’s just something you say.

I speak of the space where I met them for class last night, something conjured from my old honors program building so long ago. The dream-building was sunk in the ground like a burrow, with three musty rooms in a row, the students all chilling on loveseats and ottomans and huddled by fireplaces. I wandered back and forth trying to get them corralled into one room so I could begin, but it never happened. We never came together, never had a lecture at all, but maybe we were happy enough just trying.

“In the dream classes, I forget what subject it is I even teach,” I say.

“And how does that feel?” asks Judy. Taking in my expression, she nods. “It feels so good, doesn’t it?”

Maybe the subject itself is the source of failure, of striving, of suffering. No subject, no worries. In the late-night classes, without content, I can merely keep an eye on the students, which is really all anyone expects. Keep my eyes roving from one to another to another, and everyone will be happy. Even me.

“They’re only getting elective credits anyway, while we work through the kinks,” Judy says. “Don’t sweat it.”


I let the apartment go and sold my car, which meant the expenses for rent, gas, parking, and car insurance could be redirected into marketplace health and dental insurance with enough left over for a cafeteria plan.

Funny, though. When I went to the dentist to finally get things fixed, they said my new card would cover only a thousand dollars of work, that the rest would have to go on payments.

And I was not doing well in my daylight classes, not like I used to. I’d forgotten too much of my subject. I tried to do what I did in the late-night classes: milling around, letting my eyes rove so all would see they were being seen. It didn’t work the same in waking life.

An out-of-body feeling would come over me in class and I’d talk straight to the students about myself. I’d tell them what an adjunct was and how many of us there were. I’d tell them the definitions they might read were all wrong. We weren’t retirees or what have you—this was all we knew how to do, and the institution needed us, but it refused to make us full-time so that we were somehow never real.

I’d say how I had started vague and weak like they were now, and through education had been built up and honed. I’d developed compassion, bravery, organizational and time-management skills, people skills, deep knowledge of and passion for my subject. Though I couldn’t remember what it was anymore, I knew that was true. I felt it deep down and remembered the nights studying and enthusiasm for anything to do with that subject. Conferences, papers, speeches, video projects, and all.

I had been made into something wonderful and then I had been thrown away.

All the time saying this I was somewhat outside myself judging the room, gauging their responses. I was thinking they thought me pathetic, that they would laugh and jeer. The more sensitive and vulnerable of them would be thinking I was taking my great luck and privilege for granted. Here I was, someone who had achieved so much more than they had, and I didn’t value or deserve it. The affluent, bullying types would sense my weakness and turn away in disgust.

But the response when it came was not that. It was anger, hatred from all. I saw how they held sharpened pencils, how all the pencils raised at once.

From up by the ceiling, I watched them advance and take their turns, each one stabbing only two or three or four times before stepping back to let the others in. Such teamwork!

The blood pooled around the openings, and then as more pencils violated the same places again and again, the blood began to flow rich and red. Down my arms, soaking my tweed skirt, gliding onto the floor like dark oil with a skim of froth at its edge.

One punched through my cheek, impaling my gums, and that hurt more than anything.

I didn’t cry or fight. I only kept speaking through the pain, my eyes roving from face to face. I was still trying to teach them something.

Tenures and other adjuncts came in from the hall, watching a moment and then taking their turns too with fountain pens and such, and still I kept speaking. I knew I had nothing to say, but I couldn’t stop. Not until I was drained out could I stop, not until I had stumbled and gurgled and brought a desk down with me to the floor, my cheek sliding along in the cooling blood.

I was really up in the ceiling, not there on the floor. I watched the people milling around.

“Does this mean class is canceled?” one guy said. My sallow tenure, rolling her eyes at that, happened to spot me up in the ceiling. She smirked and looked away quickly, but another one saw, and another. They started to stack up the desks.

“It felt so real,” I tell Judy on Zoom, “and it covered so much time too. When I woke up, I knew I hadn’t gotten attacked, but I thought my apartment was gone, and my car. I might have never realized the car wasn’t still there except I got a call from security. Someone broke the windows and it got towed.”

“Maybe you’ll do those things, maybe today. Let that apartment go at least,” she says.

“We’re getting accredited, aren’t we?”

She doesn’t answer my question, but her beaming smile tells a lot. “You can’t go into your own dreams anymore. You can’t be absent like that again.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“That car got attacked even if you didn’t. Someone sensed weakness and struck it, then someone else saw it broken and towed it away.”

“I should go get it,” I say.

“Forget it. It’s gone.”


Who are they, I wonder sometimes, these people who signed up for late-night school? They are blurred at the edges, their clothing too vague to assess. Only their faces come to me clearly, and they look just like anyone else. There isn’t time to get to know them, really, but I pretend I know them well.

Tonight we’ve met in a cool, sun-dappled orchard, and while some sit under trees dozing and flirting, others pick apples and climb short ladders to reach for bright clusters of cherries. I made this space. It isn’t vague like the conference room because they give up their will and let me lead.

I weave between the trees lecturing. “At first glance it might appear ... but a closer look reveals ...” I say, and there is no content to it. I say, “Some of the earliest theories of ... maintain that ... and over time researchers began to ask ...” and a group of three young women come with fruit held in the bottoms of their blouses. Laughing, they stuff cherries in my mouth to shut me up.

Are the late-night students here just for this, just to be children?

The cherries’ flesh is crisp and sweet as apples in my mouth, and suddenly Judy is there rubbing my back, saying, “Stay with us. Good. Nothing matters, just that you stay with us.”


I show up to my eight a.m. class and there is a plump young man standing at my lectern. I turn toward the department office, glimpse the security guard waiting in shadows a few doors down. If I go for the office, he’ll head me off, tackle me, hurl me onto the sidewalk, and though it feels unfair—I haven’t done anything wrong—I turn the other way. I burst out into the cool spring morning. Yellow and salmon-colored daffodils play in the breeze, and I head toward my car to eat crackers. The car is not there, of course.

Back in my cubicle, a knock comes. No one has knocked here before.

It’s the silver-haired lady. It seems the cubicles are meant for our late-night shifts and not for full-time living. She sees numerous violations. Personal items outside the locker, appliances, “filthy, filthy” laundry. She’s marking things down on a legal pad.

“Let’s just call Judy,” I say. She’s said to call if I ever need help.

On Zoom, she’s happier than I’ve ever seen her. “There’s no problem at all,” she says.

The silver-haired woman says, “Now just one minute.”

“It’s done! Full accreditation. Maris is full time. We all are.” Something, some gesture of a hand breaks through her blurred background. My blood runs cold.

I realize that Judy is in bed. A researcher or an assistant is prepping her arm for the sleepy-shot, and the red-and-blue cords and tubes tumble down. It can’t be eight-thirty in the morning.

“Oh, I didn’t realize,” says the silver-haired woman, turning on me with the first pleasant look I’ve ever caught from her. My eyes drift down to her legal pad and catch a few cruel words. I bet she’s sorry for writing them now.

Her phone is vibrating in her pocket. Her desk phone trills from the other room.

Behind my bed, a voice says, “Five minutes to sleep cycle— put away devices, lights on.”

“It’s happening so fast,” she says. The delight in her voice makes me think of my long-dead grandma. “You better get your pajamas on and I’ll see who can set you up.” She’s moving toward the hall.

All I can think of are the daffodils, the clash of yellow and salmon, the breeze on them. I go to the door. I think I will shut it for privacy, but something has me. Some panic, some flash of rare courage. I check that the hall is clear, and never would I have guessed I’d do it, but I run.

Originally published in Bitter Apples (Cursed Morsels Press, 2023)

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