After Intelligence by Cassie Smith-Christmas
The lecture started as any other: the students sloughing in, opening their laptops, the rare one or two taking out a notebook and pen. The chatter rising like cicadas as more seats were filled. Above, the lights a vapid fluorescent.
The professor strode in. She was popular with the students: affable, always accepted papers late. Sometimes her jokes were even amusing, if a bit esoteric. She turned on the computer and tapped on the lectern microphone.
Her cadence was always the same. Words tripping over themselves in gleeful succession, followed by a long pause then a re-phrase in which Every. Word. Carried. Weight. Another frenzied jumble of sentences.
And so forth.
And then, it happened. At first it was just a shimmering, a vein of light slicing through the room. But soon things began to take shape: a folk dance high in the mountains. The sea. Paris. An abandoned train station. Streets alive with protestors. Laughter. A lone tree in a field.
The professor fell to the floor.
The walls began to pulsate with phonemes: velar fricatives and bilabial plosives, vowels high and low. Words fell from the ceiling and slotted into sonnet form, iambs parading in pairs in front of the projector. Next came fragments of Dostoyevsky and Camus, Graves and García Márquez, Rushdie and Roy, Heaney and Hurston, snaking across the room. The students delighted in the lexical ribbons that brushed their hands, the tips of their noses. More floating phonemes; the students collected sounds on their tongues as children harvest snowflakes.
The professor clutched her chest and closed her eyes.
Music burst from under the seats, the notes so bright and sumptuous the students could taste them. Colours spun from every crevice, palpable as flotsam under their fingertips. The lecture hall floor reared up and shattered into a mosaic of variegated light.
Then, just as the professor’s soul left her body, the colours collided and shot through the ceiling in one dazzling arc.
Then: nothing.
___
Staff Bulletin
April 4, 2025
Dear colleagues,
The university would like to extend their deepest condolences to the family of Professor Helen Anne Glick. She will be greatly missed by colleagues and students. Funeral details to follow.
UPCOMING EVENTS: Opening of the new Centre for Entrepreneurial Excellence and Other Ventures Masquerading as a Quest for Knowledge, 3 pm, April 25, 2025. Refreshments will be served.
LAST CHANCE TO REGISTER: Embedding AI into the Curriculum: Opportunities and Challenges Symposium, June 3-5, 2025.
Cassie Smith-Christmas lives in Galway, Ireland. Her unpublished novel The Huguenot’s Chest was a winner in the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair and the Blue Pencil Agency’s Pitch Prize. She holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow, and her writing has appeared in Ireland, the UK, and US, including Southword, Crannóg, Gutter, The Wild Word, and Frazzled Lit. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, a Forward Prize for Poetry, and shortlisted in The Best of Rural Writing 2023.
Photo by Sonny Vermeer at Pexels
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