Rust by Julie Mars

watched in fascination as the lessons of the day were erased from the blackboard, one after the other, by an energetic nun with a man’s name: Sister Mary Edwin, Sister Alphonsus, Sister Marie Peter, and so on. She had even volunteered to clap the erasers at the end of the day. She would stare into the puffs of chalk dust looking for the remnants of math or geography or religion, watch it all rise up and fall away while she held her breath and slammed the erasers together again and again. She’d gone through a phase of doing homework, all the long division problems neatly laid out, and then erasing them so the page in her notebook was as clean as she could make it. And later, in her painting, she often began with an image, a shape, a design, a mark, something that simply asserted itself on the canvas, and then spent the whole painting making it go away. She had even tried to write about it—her obsession with erasing—for one of Nick’s alter-assignments, as he called them, where he would force his students to use their lesser skills to express what went into their painting. She’d gotten an A-plus on that paper even though she was registered as an auditor, not a matriculated student, in the class. She knew about erasing—the reasons for it and the best ways to do it.
    But there he was in her mind, Rico Garcia, like a slow motion trapeze artist keeping pace with her as she gently rocked from side to side. Perhaps she responded to the sadness she saw so clearly in his eyes, though it was not the kind of sadness that cried out for rescue. It was the kind that built up over time until it simply was. She had it herself and she knew it, but green eyes were different than brown eyes. They suggested the hope that associates itself with springtime, the hint of growth and possible abundance. Brown eyes had seen too much. They appeared on the older souls, Margaret thought, the ones who were compelled for good reason to batten down the hatches from the first moment they arrived in life.
    Margaret opened her eyes and glanced down at Magpie, in whose mud-brown eyes she had been lost many times. “You want to try to get in the hammock, Mag?” she asked, knowing that it was probably not an easy thing for a dog to accomplish. But Magpie declined. She rolled over on her back, her four legs pointing skyward and her long tongue hanging out the corner of her mouth until it almost touched the ground next to her head. Margaret shifted onto her stomach and reached down to pat the silver fur on her dog’s belly. “We might have a new friend,” she said. “We’ll have to see.”
    1974

    W HEN THE night is very dark and the silence is as penetrating as it ever gets, he crosses his hands over his heart and thinks of the woman he loves. This brings a pain so searing that only his intense need for privacy prevents him from moaning, thrashing, beating his head into the concrete wall.
    She had been sitting next to him on a bus, her overnight bag—with tiny round mirrors embroidered into it—wedged into the tight space between them. It had been a long ride, and she was sleeping, her head pressed into his shoulder and her hair, which smelled of lavender, stuck along the length of his upper arm in the sweat. He had been nervous. Wired. His eyes, hidden by dark glasses, moved from one side of the winding road to the other.
    One more hour, and it would be done, he thought.
    One more hour.
    But before the hour passed, the bus had stopped. Men in uniforms got on. They walked straight down the aisle and yanked him to his feet. He had seen them coming, and he slid the bag onto the floor, tried to kick it under the seat.
    She had woken up then, sat up the way he had seen her sit up a thousand times, fully alert, and he had heard her catch her breath.
    They were pushed down the aisle of the bus. Pushed off it.
    All the people riding the bus had looked down or looked away as they were shoved past.
    Behind them, one of the officers bent down low to