She

It was the last hours. The last exams.

The sunlight was dazzling on the white columns of the lecture hall. The dust motes danced into the rays as specks of gold, drifting, weightless. The wooden floors had been polished recently and in the cloistered air, the aromas of herbs and medicinal plants were concentrated and distilled. The high fractions of oil clotted the air, rosemary and mint, pomegranate and white juniper. The underscents of wood came next: cedar, red oak and moss. And then the binding, the dark flavours; turpentine, ergot, and honey.

There they all were, the rows of students, furiously writing their four essays whilst the allocated time ticked away.

She had horribly overworked this. Before the holidays, her friend had said the homework was ten questions on every principal book. And there were fifty principal books. She had spent the whole summer in Valetta, writing in notebooks, pounding out the answers, getting to the quota of five hundred questions complete.

A wasted summer. It turned out that the requirement was ten questions - in total.

But now it all came back to her; the dream of heaven in Dante, the last days of nobility in The Leopard, the bright contradictions of Eliot. Her pen moved as easily as the dust overhead, the ink no less dancing, filled with radiance.

She looked up, and there were fully two hours of the exam remaining. But all her essays were complete and shone with finality on the pages. She looked through, corrected some minor mistakes and reflected.

“This is it. Everyone will think I choked. That I failed. But this is the best it will ever be, the best I can make it.”

The memory of Plath’s Double Take rose up in her mind:

“There is something in me that believes, that is holy, the part of me that is not yet myself, and does not belong to me. The part that I am becoming, that I fear and love; my portion in the world to come.”

She stood up from the desk to leave. There was a rustle, a gasp from two of her classmates. Ninety minutes of the exam remained. She could return.

She pushed the chair away and began to walk to the exit.

“All will be well,” she whispered. And the sunlight fell on her, like a benediction.

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