Fiction: Virgin Mary

By T.E. Hahn

 

In the faculty lounge, our new doe-eyed colleague Mary tells us that Mike the security guard asked if she was pregnant. She says he watches her on her walks to and from the bathroom. The room shifts with the weight of what we think we know.

"He gets mad if you don’t call him Michael," a history teacher says. A gym teacher says, "That's what you get offering a Catholic school salary." A lunch lady asks, "So, are you pregnant, honey?" Mary says, "Not to my knowledge." The lunch lady says, "What a creep." Mary whispers, "Maybe he meant well." The conversation drifts toward protocols and who’s supposed to report what, but Mary stays quiet. She lowers her head and says she’s just grateful for the job. The silence strains with the radiator's whine.

When Mary finally looks up, the light from the window illuminates her face and halos her hair in a thin brightness. We turn our gaze before we realize what we’re doing.

At the end of the day, I pass Michael's steady scrutiny by the exit. I salute. He nods. The badge reader clicks me through. In the cold blue, I feel eyes on my back, as if something has been revealed just beyond our knowing.

 

 

 

 

 

T.E. Hahn’s writing appears in SmokeLong Quarterly, Identity Theory, The Ex-Puritan, Flash Fiction Magazine, and elsewhere. His fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and The Best Small Fictions. He is the author of the Kirkus Star–awarded novel Open My Eyes. He holds an MFA in fiction from Fairfield University and a PhD in English literature from St. John’s University. He's a fiction reader for TriQuarterly, and he teaches literature at Great Neck North High School in New York.