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The Blue Book

Don J. Rath

When the proctor announced there was one hour left, I hadn’t made much progress. I’d already wasted the first hour trying to remember something I could use to start an intelligent-sounding answer to Question 1, but my head was too foggy. I read the second question, hoping I’d somehow have an epiphany and nail it. When I discovered I didn’t even recognize any of the names of the theorists cited, I abandoned any hope of passing my last final exam.

One hour and ten minutes earlier, as I ran up the twenty-four steps to the front entrance of Barrows Hall, the only two things on my mind had been burnt toast and the third shot of tequila from last night. Both had been bad ideas. The toast especially. Before heading out to the exam, I’d grabbed the abandoned charred piece of cold wheat bread from the bottom of the conveyor toaster in the dining hall just to get something into my stomach, thinking it would quell the fire seeping through my intestines. It didn’t. I needed water.

I opened the door into the large lecture hall on the first floor. There were maybe a hundred students spread out over the room, heads down, pens in their hands.  A proctor sat at the table in front of the room. Crew cut blond, jockish type in a black Nike tee. I had seen him somewhere before.

I spotted the open box of blue books to my left. Whoever invented the blue book must be a billionaire. Not just because of the millions of exams colleges give each year, but also because students tend to grab two or three blue books for a test that would most likely require just one. It’s a confidence thing. Somehow, if you have more than one, you feel like you know enough to write more. Then you take the extra one home like it’s a fucking souvenir. I grabbed two.

When you come to a class late, everyone gives you dirty looks. When you walk into a final exam late, everyone just feels sorry for you. Sympathy on my side, I didn’t need to be too quiet. Just civil. I stopped a third of the way down the steps, sat in an empty desk-chair on the aisle, and folded down the arm as inconspicuously as I could.

I stared at the cover of one of my blue books, fascinated by its beautiful simplicity. It was blue, of course, with the words BLUE BOOK centered at the top. There was a place to fill in my name, subject, class, section, instructor, and date, which I completed. At the upper right corner was a place to write the Box Number. No one knows what that means, and no one ever asks. Like we’re all scared about finding out something we ought to have known for the last four years. These blue books were new, specially made for Easton University, with the name and logo printed at the bottom. Manufactured by The Roaring Springs Company, which sounded more like an outfit that makes bottled water. Across the top, the words Use Your Imagination were printed in bold script. Like my imagination was going to get me through the exam.

The sheets of typewritten questions had already been distributed. I walked down the steps to the front of the room as quietly as possible, noticing several students were already writing. The proctor jock pointed to the pile of papers at the end of the table. I ran my thumb over the top corners.

“They’re all the same,” he said.

I recognized that voice. Deeper than I expected, with a bit of gravel in it. I picked up the top sheet and walked back to my desk, two stairsteps at a time.

My graduation from Easton depended on my getting a B or better on the final exam for History of Sociological Thought, boosting my GPA to the minimum requirement, and making the difference between my receiving an official Easton diploma or an empty brown envelope at my graduation ceremony in two weeks. Unfortunately, I had done very little work in the course since the midterm and hadn’t studied for the final at all, other than a cursory look at my notes for the few classes I attended. It didn’t take more than a couple of minutes to realize that my fate was leaning toward the brown envelope.

Question 1. Formal sociological theory arose in the 19th century as an attempt to explain social change. Discuss two social movements that have influenced sociological inquiry or challenged the social, economic, and political composition of the time, incorporating at least four works read in the course.

Had we read four works in this course?

I had always believed you could bullshit your way through any social science exam and earn a minimum of a C. I pulled a B on the midterm without more than a quick perusal of the first paragraphs of half a dozen articles from the reader. A sympathetic TA had found my frequent use of capitalized buzzwords in otherwise nonsensical explanations enough to give me partial credit for most of the test. But since I spent most of my time during dead week cramming for a history exam that I had likely failed, I wasn’t prepared at all.

The question wasn’t tricky. It just required thought that I hadn’t done. I started to imagine walking in the graduation procession with that empty brown envelope and the disapproving stares of my father, an Easton graduate. My smart, successful dad, Class of 1960. Phi Beta Kappa. Fuck.

I should have told Tate to kiss off last night when he dragged me to that party at Overland Hall. Some seniors who had already finished the semester – those who took courses requiring term papers instead of exams — were having a “Done Early” party.  I knew I shouldn’t go, but I’d been so depressed about bombing my history final the day before that I’d given in. Just for a while, I’d said. Then, I’d go back to my room and study. Now I remembered that’s where I’d seen the proctor. Tending bar or pouring booze or something.  I was pretty sure he had handed me one of those tequila shots.

Having to explain to my parents why I couldn’t graduate was not going to be easy. I dreaded those Sunday afternoon phone calls when my dad quizzed me about what I had learned that week, and my mom asked when was the last time I had done my laundry. Tate bragged that he hadn’t called his parents since sophomore year when he got the clap after sleeping with some dude he’d never met before and asked if they had enough money to send him to a fancy sanitarium if he went blind or crazy. It might be better if I wrote them a letter instead.  That would give them time to digest the news that I probably wasn’t graduating. It would buy me some time to come up with a plan. Summer school, make-up test, whatever else I had to do so I wouldn’t let them down completely.

How would I start?

Dear Mom and Dad,

I have some bad news.

No, I couldn’t start off sounding too negative.

Dear Mom and Dad,

It has been a very tough semester. I thought senior year would be easier, but . . .

No, too cry-ey.

I stared at what I had managed to write in the Blue Book.

Two social movements that have influenced sociological inquiry or challenged the social, economic, and political composition of the time were the –

Maybe I should write a cry letter to the TA.

Once, during a Psych midterm my sophomore year, I saw a student named Arnold Stein go to pieces. About fifteen minutes into the test, he jumped up from his seat in the second row, let out a warrior-like battle cry, and bounded up the steps to the exit, ranting about Ivan Pavlov and his fucking dogs while he ripped his blue book into pieces. Arnold became a bit of a legend at Easton. I never saw him in class again, but I always wondered if he got a second chance because he cracked up. Academic pressure, they call it. The University’s fault, not his. Since I was six rows from the back, my exit wouldn’t be as dramatic and sympathy-provoking as Arnold’s, but it might work. Then again, it had been done before.

I decided I might as well wait out the hour and at least be able to leave the room with a bit of dignity. I closed my exam book with all of five sentences written. (I had remembered something about the division of labor and Emile Durkheim, then lost my train of thought.) I didn’t want anyone to notice I had stopped writing, so I picked up the other blue book.

Dear Mom and Dad,

It has been a very tough semester.

Not really, it hadn’t. Because I had done next to no work. Just like most of the last four years. After a train wreck of a first semester, when I received my first F, I had promised my parents – and myself — that I’d buckle down and take school more seriously. I managed to pull off a B-minus, two Cs, and a D in my second semester, but I gave myself As for effort, feeling proud of my improvement. When I handed Dad my grade report, he just shook his head and said I might be better suited for a junior college instead of an elite university. From then on, it didn’t seem worth trying too hard. Skipping classes, drinking, and occasional furloughs into Manhattan had boxed me into a 1.65 GPA corner.

I had promised my dad I would go out with a bang, as he put it, just to show I could. I had no idea what I would do with a degree in English from Easton. I hadn’t bothered to apply to grad school and hadn’t interviewed for any jobs. Four expensive years of college with nothing to show for it except an empty brown envelope.

I looked down at the white lined paper, double-spaced. The simple design was ingenious, creating a sense of receptiveness as if the blue book were open to any thought. Use your imagination, the Roaring Springs Company said.

But I really tried to buckle down. My history final on Monday was brutal, and I’m afraid I didn’t do very well.

That would be the only true sentence in the letter.

But I just finished my Sociology exam, and I feel terrific about it. Three days of arduous studying really helped.

Arduous. Really?

I look forward to seeing you at graduation very soon.

Love,

Yes, I really do love you, Dad. Despite how miserable you’ve made my life with your lofty standards.

Ethan

It was the kind of letter Dad would love to receive. The kind of letter that would make Mom stop asking me about my laundry. I scribbled my name on the front cover, wondering if they would see the humor of receiving a letter in a blue book. A letter containing almost as many sentences as I had written for my final exam. I would probably get a higher grade if I turned in the letter instead of my incoherent response to Question 1.

A letter instead of the final exam? The prof would probably think it was a sick joke, or maybe just a stupid mistake, the kind committed by a student who spent the last week making himself delirious from too much studying and too little sleep.

I looked over at the proctor jock. He wasn’t getting paid to verify what students were turning in. He had no way of knowing. No one would until the blue books were distributed among the TAs for grading. Maybe no one would notice for another day or two, during which time I could –

Was I fucking nuts? It would never work. They were all too smart to fall for a trick like that. Or were they? It wasn’t worth the risk. If I got caught, I would be expelled for sure. Or would I? They could believe my story or not.  If they didn’t, I flunked, and I’d be no worse off than I already was.

Proctor Jock looked at his watch. I recognized the brown leather strap now. I remembered looking at his arms as he handed me the shot glass and thinking the guy sure had a nice tan.

“Time,” he called out.

I had to make a decision fast. I watched the other students file down the steps, placing their blue books in the ever-growing pile. I stood up so no one would think I was still writing and waited a couple of minutes. I walked to the front of the room, avoiding eye contact with the departing students. There he is, The Late Guy, they were probably thinking. Poor kid. His tardiness had cost him at least ten points.

I walked up to the table and looked at the proctor. If he recognized me from last night, he didn’t show it. All I got was a stern face and a quick nod. I didn’t nod back. Then I placed my blue book on top of the pile.

The one with the letter in it.

It was an easy thing to do. My hand didn’t even shake. I started to walk away, then stopped and turned.

“What box is it?” I still wanted to see if he would acknowledge me from the night before.

He looked puzzled. “Box?”

I pointed toward the cover of the blue book. “See, it says here – box number?”

“I don’t think it matters,” he said.

It didn’t matter. I grabbed my jacket and walked up the steps, my blue book, the other one with the four-sentence final exam, tucked under my arm.

▪

I SPENT THE NEXT SIX HOURS in my dorm room, the course books from History of Sociological Thought spread out over my bed. I reread Question 1. Two social movements? Four works? I looked at the syllabus and the cluster of assigned readings from the first half of the course. I thumbed through a few of the texts and picked up some familiar keywords. Industrialization. Secularism. Enlightenment. I skimmed the Durkheim volume and folded the corners of seven different pages. The random bits didn’t add up to a coherent response yet, but there was something there, something to start with. It was already afternoon, and I wanted a nap. I wanted to lay down between the writings of Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim and forget any of this was happening. But I didn’t have much time left. So I stopped perusing and sat down at my desk, my black Bic pen, the same one I had carried into the exam earlier that day, positioned over the middle of the first page of the blue book.

I can’t recall the words I used or the meaning of any of what I wrote. It was rushed and unpolished, but it was an answer. The kind you write in a blue book during a final exam when you’re pressed for time. Eight sheets later, double-sided, it was done, and I moved on to the befuddling Question 2.

More open books, more bent page corners, more scratching my head as I gazed at the syllabus. Just get enough to answer. I picked up the blue book and scribbled #2 in the middle of the first line, then began to write. Even faster than before, pausing only to make sure my block-lettered buzzwords were neat and prominent. CLASSISM. DRAMATURGY. THE POWER ELITE. I plastered the remnants of my half-completed thoughts over the black-inked pages. I had to restrain myself because time was running out.

And paper was running out. It all had to fit in that one blue book I had brought back with me.

It was past four-thirty when I quit. I found a brown manila envelope on my desk, the aspirin bottle perched beside it. I wrote my parents’ address on the front and stuffed the blue book inside. Then I ran down to the campus post office as fast as I could.

The clerk was about to shut her window when I stepped inside. I needed a stamp, I told her, just enough postage for this envelope. She looked up at the clock on the wall behind me, trying to make me feel shitty. But she put out her hand and weighed the envelope on the small metal scale to her right.

“Twenty-two cents, sir,” she said. I handed her a quarter.

“Will it go out today?” I asked.

She nodded as she handed me three discolored pennies. I was sure they were the dirtiest ones she could find in her cash drawer.

I stumbled back to my room, hungry but too tired to eat. I thought of the burnt toast from that morning.

 Even if I pulled it off, would it make any difference to my dad? A B in my Sociology course meant a meager 1.70000 (rounded) GPA, hardly something he’d be proud of. He still wouldn’t accept that school didn’t come easy for me, that I wasn’t him. And if he couldn’t accept that, could he accept everything else about me? The shit he didn’t know yet. Could he accept me for who I was?  

▪

MY PHONE RANG two days later.

“Mister Warwick?” an unfriendly voice said. “This is Barry Timms, one of Professor Martin’s TAs.”

I held my breath. I remembered him from the two discussion sections I’d attended that semester—a tall fellow with a bald spot and a wheezy voice.

“There seems to be an issue with your final exam in Professor Martin’s course,” Timms said.

“An issue?” I said it just as he had, making the soft s hiss just a bit before sliding into the sh.

“The blue book you submitted for your final exam. It contained some sort of letter.”

 This was it. I hesitated to speak because I had one shot of pulling this off. I wet my lips, wishing I had rehearsed for this moment.

“Oh, no,” I said, with all the distress I could put in my voice. “I mean, I wrote a letter to my parents after I finished the test, and I wrote it in a spare blue book. You know, kind of — as a joke. But I mailed it to them.”

“The only blue book we have with your name on it was this letter.”

My palms started to perspire.

“But—that can’t be,” I said, trying my best to kill my nervous stutter. Then I waited for Timms to speak.

“So you’re telling me you wrote your exam in a blue book and a letter in another blue book? And you mailed the letter to your parents?”

I felt the queasiness in my stomach, like I’d just eaten a bad meal. I had to sound confident but contrite. “Yes, sir. I’m sure I did.”

  “Is it possible you mailed them the blue book with the exam in it?”

“No, I’m quite sure I turned in the exam.”

“Well, that’s not what I have here, Mr. Warwick.”

I paused. Everything was going according to plan, so why did I feel so edgy?

“Unless I—I mean, I remember having both blue books in front of me when the proctor called time. I must have accidentally—” I let my voice fall off for a second. “Oh, this is terrible. This is terrible.” I sounded like the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz and wanted to slap myself.

“When did you mail the blue book to your parents?” Timms said, very businesslike.

“That same day, Mr. Timms. In the afternoon. I dropped it off at the campus post office, right before it closed.”

“Well, it seems we have a problem. I’m not sure what to do.” Timms hesitated. “Do you know if your parents received it?”

“I haven’t spoken to them.”

Timms was silent for a moment. “I’ll need to speak with Professor Martin and see what he wants to do.”

From the few lectures I had attended, Martin struck me as a serious, by-the-book type, unlikely to be amused by such a mishap. So I needed to get Timms on my side, and quick.

“I guess you do. It’s just that I’m about to graduate and really need to pass this course. I’m not sure what I’ll do if Professor Martin fails me.”

Timms didn’t respond. I thought I heard him chewing on something.

“I hate to ask, but could you call my parents? They can verify that they have my exam. Then maybe they could send it back?”

“I think we can resolve this, Mr. Warwick,” Timms finally said. “Give me their phone number. I will confirm they have the blue book with your exam, and arrange for them to return it directly to me.”

I suppressed a sigh of relief.

“Can you do that?” I said. “I mean, is there time?”

“If they’ve received it, yes, there should be time.”

“Mr. Timms, I feel so stupid,” I said, trying to sound as humble as I could.

Then he laughed, his breathiness muffling what was almost a giggle. “Mistakes happen. Though I can’t say I’ve ever seen a situation like this before.”

“I’m grateful you’re being so understanding. I really hope we can straighten it out.”

I hung up the phone and lay sideways on my bed. Emile Durkheim was still on the floor, his angry bearded face looking up at me.

▪

I WOKE UP THE NEXT MORNING, relaxed from nine hours of tequila-free sleep. And proud of myself. Right after I hung up on Timms, I called my mother and told her about the blue book. She hadn’t checked the mail yet, but when she returned to the phone, she confirmed there was a brown envelope, addressed in my handwriting. I told her to wait for a call from Timms. Later that night, she called me back and said she had promised Timms to send the blue book the following day by express mail. She and my dad had shared a good laugh over the whole incident over dinner.

“And we’d love to see the letter, by the way,” she said before she hung up. She was making it clear that I never wrote her.

The plan was working.

And that was the problem. Because Barry Timms sounded like a really nice guy, and I had just turned him into a major league patsy.

Famished, I got to the dining hall just when breakfast was closing. I sat at a table in the corner by myself and picked up the Easton Daily. The front-page story was about Jeremy Adams, a university custodian, who had been arrested the day before.  Mr. Adams had participated in a bank robbery in Milwaukee back in 1965, but had fled before he could be apprehended. He’d spent the last twenty years on the run, most of that time working at Easton.

Bum luck, I thought. He probably thought he had made it. Who would still be looking for him, after twenty years, particularly in a sleepy New England college town a thousand miles away? Who would have thought that an ex-Milwaukee police officer with a photographic memory would be visiting the Easton campus on a college tour with his daughter, and would recognize Adams as he carried a trash can of raked leaves down the sidewalk in front of the admissions office?  Adams had offered no resistance, the article said. He didn’t try to run. It almost sounded like he was expecting it.

And maybe he was. Maybe it didn’t matter to him that it had been twenty years. Maybe he never stopped looking over his shoulder.

I looked at the two photos in the newspaper. One reproduced from Mr. Adams’s university ID. The other a picture of him from 1965, in a plaid shirt, grinning, a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon in his right hand.

I stared at the second photo for what must have been five minutes before I began to recognize myself. A cap and gown instead of a plaid shirt. An Easton diploma instead of a beer.

Twenty years from now, would I still be looking over my shoulder, too?

I started to lose confidence that this story would end happily. These people were way smarter than me. What if Timms thought my answers, though rough, were just a bit too good, too well-written to have been produced in the two-hour pressure cooker of a closed book final exam? What if Proctor Jock ratted me out for drinking tequila shots the night before, and remembered I’d stumbled in late, too hungover to have written sixteen paragraphs on DRAMATURGY and THE POWER ELITE and whatever else I’d stuffed into my response to Question 1?

And I started obsessing over the blue books. I remembered I had written only my name on the cover of the one with the letter, but had filled in all the details – except the box number – on the one containing the exam. I wouldn’t have filled in all that information on the cover of a letter to my parents. So how could I have mistaken it for the blue book with the exam?

I didn’t know if my mom had opened the envelope before she returned it to Mr. Timms.  Likely not. My mom was just good about accepting things and executing them. But what about my dad? Had he seen the blue book? Had he read what I’d written?

Dad was one of those men who took nothing at face value. He needed to be convinced. He could smell bullshit clear from the other side of town. Maybe that’s why I’d reached a point when I stopped hoping to please him, because he never took me at face value. Like that erector set I received for Christmas when I was six years old. I spent an entire day replicating the Eiffel Tower from a picture in the encyclopedia.  Mom and I had moved it to the center of the dining room table ten minutes before he arrived home from work. His first question had been who had helped me build it.

The more I thought about it, the less likely I believed he would buy my story, that this whole blue book incident was an honest screw-up.  He was more intelligent than that.  Class of 1960. Phi Beta Kappa.

The one bit of reading I could recall from my freshman year was the Easton University Honor Code, only because I had skimmed it a few times out of pure boredom while waiting in a long line to get my meal card.  I knew the consequences of cheating. I’d be expelled. Period. A permanent stain on my record. No other college worth its stuff would admit me to let me finish my degree. Expulsion would ruin whatever future I had.

But if I were allowed to withdraw, it could play out differently. Sure, Easton would never let me back in, but another place probably would. I’d just have to come up with an acceptable explanation. Sudden illness. Family emergency. Mental breakdown, like Arnold Stein. No permanent stain on my record. A chance to make it right.

I walked through the main quadrangle. As much as I struggled with school over the last four years, I had always loved this spot. The imposing brick façade of the administration building at its center. The immaculate emerald lawns bordered by split-rail cedar fences. The swaying maple trees that dotted the quad’s walkways. It felt like a home to me. Like validation. Like I was here and good enough to be here, no matter what my dad thought.

But I wasn’t. I’d cheated. I’d broken the rules. And for the first time, I had done more than something that would disappoint my parents. I had disappointed myself.

I didn’t know whether it was the possibility of discovery or my eroding self-esteem that tipped the scales. But I decided to turn myself in.

I had met Assistant Dean Richardson only once before, freshman year, when I’d received my first F. She didn’t mince words about failing a core course being a problem, but she gave me a bit of rope, too. Freshman year is tough. Introductory English Lit can be a challenging course, even if you’ve done the reading. (I had not.) There’s still plenty of time left. Move on, she had advised.

I looked up her extension in the university directory and called her office. Yes, she was in this week. Yes, she could see me today. Would four o’clock be too late?

▪

IT WAS AN UNUSUALLY HOT DAY in May when I lined up with eleven hundred of my classmates to make the trek from our gathering point at Wheeler Hall to the quadrangle where graduation would be held. The cops had barricaded the four blocks of city streets so that the haves of Easton could walk freely and not be disturbed by the have-nots. As I passed through the main gate, I looked up at the intricate woven bends of black wrought iron above me, as if I were entering a prison. This quad, my place of peace, the thing about Easton I’d miss the most, had been transformed, overtaken by smiling, boastful parents.

Including my own, whom I saw out of the corner of my eye, applauding respectfully from their aisle seats, reserved for alumni, as I walked by. I did not want to see my dad’s frozen smile, not then. That toxic mix of entitlement and incredulity, that his son deserved nothing less, yet perhaps still doubtful he’d earned it.

He had accepted my story, or at least pretended to. Maybe for no other reason than to please my mother, not to spoil her day. Mom lived for events like this, moments to feel proud, willing to believe in the miraculous A I’d scored on that final exam, unspoiled by improbable tales of misdirected blue books, making graduation possible.

He had accepted it, but he hadn’t stopped asking questions. Not many, but carefully placed ones. Am I correct in understanding that you couldn’t tell the difference between a blue book with fifteen pages of writing and a hastily scribbled note to your parents? Are we sure this TA has the final say on this matter, and that it will be accepted by the professor? Or does the professor even know about it?

I wanted to believe that his questions were irrelevant now. The exam had made its way to Mr. Timms, the short essays scored, the final grade submitted, the final tally of my thirty-six-course credits verified and processed, my preprinted Easton diploma moved from the HOLD to the RELEASE pile. The result of a flawless execution of my clever plan, perhaps the cleverest thing I’d done in four years of college.

So why was he still asking?

As I walked the last steps to my preassigned row, I saw Assistant Dean Richardson standing next to her aisle seat, looking all academic in her flowing black robe. She did not look at me, and if she had, I doubt if she would have remembered me from freshman year. I had to be just another no-show four o’clock appointment on her calendar, probably the last item on her schedule. I hoped she had at least gone home early that afternoon.

I wondered how my life would be different if I had kept that appointment. Whether Assistant Dean Richardson would have been as understanding of a graduating senior who’d turned himself in for cheating as she was of a devil-may-care freshman who hadn’t done a bit of work all semester and ended up with a well-deserved F in English. But more likely, she would have expected me to have grown up in the last three years. And she probably didn’t have a ton of discretion – or sympathy — when it came to the honor code.

“Move on,” she had said.

And that’s what I was doing. That was the choice I had made. Because that’s what I’d taught myself to do. Take the easy way out. Avoid an argument. Be what someone else wanted me to be.

Thanks, Dad.

I listened to the Dean of Academic Affairs announcing the name of the summa cum laude graduates. After she finished the G’s, I stopped paying attention. I kept imagining myself sitting in my parent’s living room, a few years from now, my dad and I having a martini and joking about that crazy thing that had happened years back with my Sociology final exam, that awful mix-up that had nearly derailed my graduation from Easton. We would have that same conversation every few years, still finding it humorous, but each year, a bit less so. It would always end the same way. “Yeah,” he’d say, staring into his martini, a strained half-smile on his wrinkled face, a suspicious squint in his green eyes, as if there was just one more question on his mind.

And one day, I would surprise him and tell him the truth. The whole shitty story. He would be shocked at first, I was sure. But then he’d appreciate the cleverness of it all. He’d laugh, slap me on the back, tell me I was smarter than he’d ever given me credit for. Tell me I’d done the right thing by not turning myself in, not ruining my future over a lousy test. What good was any of that sociological bullshit anyway? Why should not knowing what fucking Emile Durkheim thought about society blow your chance at a successful life? Right, Dad, I’d say, and laugh with him.

Or maybe he’d think even less of me than he already did. Even less of me than I did myself.

As I stood up from my folding chair, sandwiched between Viola Wallace and Dirk Watson, ready to make my way to the platform to receive my diploma, I wondered how many years it would take before I had the guts to start that conversation.

Maybe Jeremy Adams would be out of prison by then.

▪ ▪ ▪

Don J. Rath holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte. A recently retired finance executive, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and writes short fiction and creative nonfiction, focusing on themes of identity, race, family, and LGBTQ+ experience. His work has been published in Musepaper (New Millennium Writings), Hynopomp, Scribes *MICRO* Fiction, Blood and Bourbon, and the upcoming 42 Word Stories Anthology. Read the author’s commentary on his story.

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