But the image of Vance-for that was what we all called him-bolting himself inside his gear-packed office, where only months earlier he’d rigged a working model of the solar system to the overhead light, and ramming a sawed-off shotgun down his own throat, was to be the cataclysm that permeated our conversations and recontoured our relationships ever after. Ismay, had fallen on a vintage sword like his defeated Roman generals. We wouldn’t have been surprised if dowdy Miss Ayler, who so worshipped Virginia Woolf, had filled her pockets with stones and vanished into the Rappahannock. The defining and indelible event of our pre-college years-for me and for my cohort of honors-level classmates at Laurenville High School-was the suicide, at age forty-two, of our twelfth grade physics teacher, Vance Rottman. It first appeared in the New Orleans Review.
“Prisoners of the Multiverse” is taken from a story collection entitled The Liar’s Asylum, just published by Black Lawrence Press.
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