The small college that hosted the summer writers’ conference was nestled beside woods so deep the air felt damp and smelled of frogs. Nearly two years without students there, the school had been partially reabsorbed and vines dropped like spider silk from lampposts, snaked across the paved walkways connecting dorm to lecture hall. Beside the path to the bookstore, someone pulled a rubber Chewbacca mask over a tree stump in what felt like a nod to the bears.
In her welcome letter, the director of the writers’ conference expressed gratitude we could meet again in-person. She was enthusiastic about a return to beloved traditions lost to online formats—the mid-conference bonfire, quick dips in the creek—but there was also a hint of danger in her repeated suggestion that attendees adopt buddy systems and not forget their flashlights. Bears had the run of campus for most of the pandemic and were now turning up where they shouldn’t—lolling across coffeehouse patio, body slamming vending machines, overturning trashcans outside the dining hall, leaving uncoiled curly fries in their wake.
“I didn’t agree to bears,” Izzy said. Izzy was a forty-something make-up artist from Los Angeles. She knew how to turn people into zombies, or make them appear to have been impaled by unlikely projectiles. She’d been married to the same man for twenty years and had three children. She was a poet who wrote sonnets exclusively because, she said, she enjoyed constraints. “I need a formal structure,” Izzy explained. “Or I lose focus.”
I was a fifty-something librarian from Florida where they were banning books in public schools. I’d been working on my novel-in-progress for over a decade and carried a train schedule in my purse, not because I was leaving, it was more that I liked knowing I could. I’d never married but had been in love—with a mathematician who spoke about numbers in a way that felt poetic—only he never remembered my birthday, or asked about my writing.
I met Izzy on day one of the conference. She’d been sitting with a group of poets from her workshop, picking olives from a pizza slice, listening to them complain about the state of disrepair on campus. “The windows don’t open in my room,” someone said. A collective grumbling ensued. There was no air conditioning in the dorms. The only bathroom, just off the main lecture hall, had a beehive under one of the sinks. The poets hypothesized about reasons for the school’s clear decline.
“The pandemic,” they said. “Obviously.”
“And shrinking endowments.”
“The liberal arts are under assault,” someone suggested.
“Tuition inflation.”
“The student debt crisis.”
“Trade schools are making a comeback,” said Izzy.
Whatever the reasons, we ate our cafeteria lunch while the school actively decomposed around us.
There was a mysterious stain on the chair that went with the desk in my room. Something dark had pooled there. I imagined the undergraduates who’d inhabited this space and threw a towel over the stain, felt lucky my windows opened. I’d foraged a fan from the basement because it was so hot, breathing felt like something I was doing with a sweater tied around my face. A cold shower sounded good, so I set out, down the hallway, with a sense of purpose and optimism. It wasn’t until I’d fully unpacked my shower kit, relieved my menopausal body of its robe, was standing there in only a shower cap and flip flops, that I realized the showers were out of order. My body was so slick with sweat, my flip flops farted as I made my way back to my room. I sat on the windowsill, in my underwear, feeling grateful to be there.
Izzy texted to ask if I was ready to walk over to the bonfire. We were equally uneasy about the bears and had chosen each other as buddies the moment this fact made itself known. We also ate our meals together and laughed easily. At night, when the air outside was cooler, we rocked on a porch swing under a light that buzzed with insects and wattage. We stared across the lawn to where the woods began, imagining the bears chuffing and pawing there. The college hosted another conference the same week as ours, something about bluegrass that attracted bearded men and lean women in long skirts. The twang of mandolin and fiddle boomeranged between stars.
Izzy talked about constraints and I listened. She liked knowing her work would force itself like a weed through a sidewalk’s crack. It hadn’t occurred to me that structure could liberate. When I thought of constraints, I thought of marriage and setting the table for dinner. I imagined listening to the mathematician solve for x while ideas for my novel appeared like stray socks in the laundry, becoming things I’d never know what to do with.
We set out for the bonfire, holding our flashlights as if we might need to use them as clubs. Izzy was still talking about sonnets—iambic pentameter and heroic couplets—things I only halfway remembered from my undergraduate years. I had a map of campus but the darkness was disorienting. Overhead lights blinkered or were out altogether. We passed the swimming pool, which had been drained of water, and a nonfunctional emergency call station wrapped in construction tape. Banjos exploded from someplace we couldn’t see. We heard voices and followed them, arriving where we believed the bonfire would be, but found instead an empty parking lot and boarded-up building. Like a scene from a horror movie, we stood there, encircled by the breathing dark. Our eyes squinted in anticipation, chainsaw-wielding killer or bear, we didn’t know what.
“Which one of us is the smart one?” Izzy asked.
Everything was cinema, and she knew the rules, the dumb one would be the first to go.
We looked at each other, laughed uncomfortably, unable to tell who was who.