Lucas Flatt
Office Hours
Office hours: are the worst. It says that on the dingy yellow note card they gave us to list our times upon our office doors. Sometimes, as footsteps clatter down the long hallway outside my office, there comes a pause and then a titter, and as the footsteps fade, I feel seen, or heard, or something. I'm sort of a jokester, here.
But now I've changed the placard. It reads: "Office hours 24/7/365." I'm never leaving. I've packed in supplies. It's sort of the opposite of solipsism; I mean only to exist in the exterior of me, insofar as I'm useful, and for my students, always.
I have no further plans to meet my classes. Notions of home, even a physical world beyond campus, are ceding from my consciousness. I’ll leave this office only as per root biological functions.
It’s OK. No one will have a problem with it. They let me get away with pretty much anything. They let everyone get away with everything. I’m growing uncertain whether there even is a tangible “they.” By the juridical subtraction of a “they,” there is no longer any meaning in “it.”
There is a wide horizontal window behind me in my mildew-smelling office. It looks out on the faculty parking lot, where I want to go to smoke. No one really comes by my office hours. Heretofore, I haven’t publicized them in class. The proscribed “Office Hours” slots on the proscribed syllabi have been left conspicuously blank. No one noticed.
I post an update to my syllabi online, listing my times as “always and forever.”
It's quite a syllabus. On the second page, I like to superimpose a face over the text. For a while, it was Joseph Stalin, really zoomed in on his nostrils, mustache, upper lip—the danger triangle, that Soviet bloc of his lower-central face. For a while, it was Charlie Parker because I wanted to think outside the box, and it worked in a sense. Here we are.
Today, I have a student conference scheduled. It’s for a young woman who hasn’t been to class in weeks. I doubt she’ll show, and if she does, there’s nothing to talk about. She hasn’t turned in any work.
I break my vow of ever-presence almost immediately to go outside for a smoke break. I'll be late for my meeting, my only professional obligation for the afternoon, but she can sweat it out if she shows. It's late in the fall, but hot. You have to smoke in a parking space cordoned off in yellow tape. In the space, several trash cans bring the bees. I do not like bees.
The bees should be dead by now, in mid-November. But they’ve decided to live and swarm the trash cans so I can't enjoy my cigarettes. I'm not allergic to bee stings, but I don't enjoy them. Most people act surprised when a bee stings them. Not me. I’m vigilant.
(Fuck you, bees).
Their tendency to surprise really says everything you need to know about people, in case you don’t know much. Bees are hardly stealthy creatures.
I stay vigilant and stand a little outside the cordon. It’s risky because the campus cop holds most sacred the jurisdiction of the designated smoking area. He doesn’t have much else to do.
Another place bad for bees is the dump. One time, and this is a true story, I was dropping off the trash and there were lots of yellow jackets swarming the dumpster. In anticipation of the yellow jackets, which are indisputably the worst variety of bee, I had on long sleeves, long pants, gloves, dead of summer. Panicked, I was transporting the trash from my trunk too fast and ripped a bag, spilling my garbage all over the lot. The bees swarmed, so I hopped back in my Corolla and made to escape.
The dump attendant, an elderly woman with a frizzy permanent, came running out, waving her freckled arms. I barely cracked my window.
“You can pick that up,” she said, like she’s giving me permission.
“Bees!” I yelled back, through just the tiniest crack in my window. As I drove away, I yelled, “Allergic!” which was a lie, and by then I’d closed the window. Anyway, I had to find another dump.
Three women are smoking in the designated smoking spot amid fewer bees than I'd expected, so I'm sitting by the cans. One of the women is in my class, and she sees me, but she's talking about my class like I'm not sitting there smoking.
We’re doing research papers in the 1010s. I’ve made the classic mistake of allowing open topics, and you couldn’t even imagine how stupid these topics are. Hers is how feminism is hurting women.
She’s telling the other women about her topic, in media res; I’ve missed the beginning. She’s talking about a “her,” whom I gather might be another teacher. My student says, and I’m quoting, “I told her that I’m writing about all the problems with feminism. Like, how unfair it is to guys. And she tells me ‘You’re stupid. You’re too stupid to deserve feminism.’”
The way she says it, straight reportage, no indignation, no humor, absolutely kills me. I laugh loudly. Now I’m not invisible anymore. All three women stare, and I toss the lit cigarette in a can and go back in for my office meeting.
Nothing in ten years teaching prepares me for what I encounter back in my office.
My appointee is waiting for me, looking put out. But her indignation hardly registers because of her outfit. She's tall and muscular with lots of piercings in her face and a severe, martial buzzcut. If she peer-reviewed with the anti-feminist, I don't think it would go well.
But instead of her usual punk get-up, overalls and t-shirts with profane band names stenciled on by hand, by her, I imagine, which is to say, bootleg punk rock t-shirts…she's got on a toga. And sandals made of cork and twine that she's certainly made herself. And a Grecian wreath of olive leaves resting jauntily atop her quarter inch of rigid pink buzzcut.
“Hello, Margaret,” I say. Then I remember she prefers “Peg.” I mumble, “Peg,” by way of apology. Sometimes I mumble. It irritates the students. I can tell she’s irritated.
"It's 3:45," she tells me. I want to ask her how she knows, with nary a sundial on the premises, but I shrug and show her into my office.
“I like your costume,” I say. It’s well past Halloween.
“It’s not a costume.”
I look at her like, go on.
She doesn’t take the hint. “What’s my grade in the class?” She throws her muscular arms across her toga. “My advisor wants to know what my grade is in your class. You haven’t posted midterm grades.”
That checks out. I always feel like I’m forgetting something, and I’m never wrong. I’ll hear about this. I get emails, never from the same person, with made-up sounding names like Jane Frowning-Constable and Douglas Oversight.
“It would have to be an F,” I say. “It’s like asking me to grade a stranger on the street.” I point to an imaginary person behind Peg. “She looks like a C minus.” I consider if I’ve just committed sexual harassment.
She nods. “I figured. That’s not really why I’m here.”
I nod, like, go on.
“I’m here because I’ve decided that I’m Aristotle.”
I blink at her.
“After your lecture on Aristotle, I started thinking about it, and I decided that’s me. Aristotle.”
“You weren’t here for that lecture.”
“You posted it online.”
That doesn’t sound like something I would do, but I nod anyway.
“Interesting,” I say. I mean, it is. That’s one word for it.
“I’ve decided I want to teach your class tonight. You have a class tonight, don’t you?”
“I do, yes, in theory. I’m not going to it, though.”
She nods, but not like, Go on. "I'd like to teach it. I think it would be good for them. My adviser, Ms. Penny Wisdom, says it would be a good experience for me.”
“And what qualifies you to teach the class?”
“What qualifies you?”
I shrug. The truth is that I have a bunch of degrees. More than anyone else who teaches here, but not the right degrees. They don’t really form a cohesive gravitas.
Something buzzes behind my head. Aristotle glances over my shoulder. “So, what you’re telling me is that you assume all people are failures.”
I pivot on my rolling chair, scanning for the buzz. My desk is too large for my small office and I bang my knees with a clang; I’m always doing this and irritating the man next door who surely teaches farts, such is his mastery. I can’t find anything, and spin back on Peg. “Beg pardon?”
“You said that you would give a stranger on the street an F.”
“I said ‘a C minus.’ And anyway, that’s rather a misinterpretation of what I meant.”
She nods, and grins at me. She's going for smug, but in her Animal House getup, she looks too ridiculous for proper condescension. "What kind of ethical basis would support that?"
I consider the ethical basis. “You got the job.” I want to see what happens.
She’s not thrown. “What time does class begin?”
“Five. You should probably know that. You’re enrolled in the class, and it’s the 4th of November.”
She nods, stands, and goes. I guess she'll find it. The campus isn't large. I mumble, "Room 204."
~
Here I am, facing a conundrum. I've committed myself to omnipresent office hours. I'm already planning to present on this at an upcoming conference our college hosts. I'm going to speak very quietly, smiling smugly, about how important it is that we're "there" for the students. I'll hold for applause every time I say, "There." People will leave smiling smugly to themselves and chattering briskly about how they now intend to be "there" for their students. But none more so than me, because I'll only be telepresent, holding office hours while giving the presentation. Probably I'll stage a student coming to meet with me and interrupting the talk at some crucial point.
I've vowed not to leave, but I want to see Peg teach my class as Aristotle, so at 4:55, I post a note that maybe says "BRB" in my illegible scrawl and travel down the empty hallways to room 204. Ever since the pandemic, the campus is nearly always nearly empty. I say "nearly always" only excepting those times that it is empty.
No one can figure out where the students have gone. I picture them all in a parking lot somewhere. I’ve always pictured students who don’t attend classes as assembled somewhere in a parking lot, looking somewhat bored, somewhat lost, but all the same relieved that they’re not in my class.
I’ve presented this theory at faculty meetings. Some tittered, but I was serious. People spoke in warm tones evoking great empathy for our lost students, what they’re going through. But why feel sorry for them? Isn’t the point of standing pointlessly in some parking lot to relish the sweet release of giving up? I can’t shake the feeling that this is a form of Nirvana. Aren’t we always getting emails about mindfulness workshops? Why not the eternal present of the parking lot?
As I leave the dark and empty atrium for the dark and empty hallway to my classroom, I pass the anti-feminist. She makes pointed eye contact and says, “That trash can is on fire.”
And, as a reflex, I put my hand to my temple as an indication of “drat,” furrow my brow in embarrassment, and, somehow, the anti-feminist student simply disappears, evidently having been some form of censorious hallucination. This rattles me, but as the campus is so empty, I chalk it up to a haunting, or else to some phenomena bigger than myself.
At 204, I find Peg setting up at the whiteboard. Attending my class are only four other students: an international engineering student from the local university making up freshmen comp, a young man–Tyler?--with a scruffy beard who often sleeps, and two young women who sit in the back and giggle at everything anyone says, including me, which I find very distracting and disheartening, but am too cowardly to address.
Peg isn’t, though. “Shut up,” she says to them, before they can even begin giggling, and points to the word “Arastotel” written neatly on the board. “I’m Aristotle. I’ll be taking over this class.”
The international student raises his hand. “Yes, Shiresh.”
“Excuse me, teacher. You’ve misspelled ‘Aristotle.’”
Peg turns and considers her work. “I know how to spell my name.”
Shiresh acquiesces with a nod. The women in the back stifle giggles.
Peg/Aristotle unfolds a wrinkled notebook page. “The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living differ from the dead. The roots of education are bitter, but the fruits are sweet. Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom. Those who can, do. Those who understand, teach.”
I nod along. She’s doing pretty well, so far. I’m definitely learning a lot. Even Tyler is awake. But that seems to be the end of the lecture; she wads up the paper and bounces it off Tyler’s forehead. “It’s all horseshit!”
Of course! We all nod vigorously. How did we not see it?
“An ‘education’ is what they want you to believe.” She points at me. I look around, but she clearly means me. I shrug and grimace in apology.
“It’s not your fault, Mr. Flatt. You’ve tried. All the same, someone has to pay the price.”
The students nod again, more vigorously. Shit. I’m starting to think this was a mistake.
She holds up a hand. “And that person is me.”
Thank God. I sigh loudly in relief.
Peg/Aristotle withdraws from a canvas bag a mason jar of brown water with leafy twigs jutting out. I believe there are acorns floating in the mire.
“Are you, like, going to drink that?” one of the women in the back asks. You can honestly feel the joyous anticipation in her voice.
“Please don’t,” I volunteer, though I sort of want to see it, too.
“I fear I have no choice but to drink this hemlock.” (I consider telling her those are clearly maple leaves, but decide to let her cook.) “Thousands of years ago, the nation-state of Ancient Greece put me on trial and sentenced me to extinction for challenging its dogmas; now, I am going to face that fate again.”
The other young woman in the back says, “Wasn’t that Plato?”
I’m touched that she’s tried to remember.
Shiresh raises his hand. “Excuse me, teacher, but it was Socrates.”
“Whatever,” Peg/Aristotle/Socrates says. “Here’s to you, Mark.” She raises the jar in both hands toward the bearded student, who evidently is not named Tyler, but Mark. He gives a “who, me?” raise of the eyebrows. Classic Mark.
Peg upturns the jar and takes huge, splashing gulps, the stuff spilling down her neck and onto her toga.
“Don’t,” I mumble.
“Guh, it’s straight ass!” she exclaims.
Shiresh and Mark shake their heads. The women giggle. I only watch as Peg takes breaks to breathe and belch, resumes chugging. Surely, she’ll vomit, I tell myself, and I start to rise to go find the custodian, but remember he was furloughed.
Peg turns up her palms and holds them out to the class. "And so," she says, hiccupping, "Crito, we owe a cock to Axios." She retches and covers her mouth with her fist. Shiresh raises his hand, but she waves him off. After several more huge retches, she concludes: "Pay it and do not forget it."
“Cock!” shouts one of the young women and they bury their heads in their arms, shrieking with giggles.
I go to the desk, seeing it high time that I resume control of the situation. “Thank you, Peg,” I say.
“I need to sit down,” she says. She goes to the corner and slumps down against the wall.
I sit crisscross applesauce at the center of my desk, as is my habit. The students seem relieved to have me back in charge. Now feels like a good time to explain my never-ending office hours, and, as I do, as I extend my invitation of total accessibility to my students, I begin to levitate an inch or so above the desk. I just go with it. “You see, we at Pioneer State think it’s so important that you know that we’re always there for you, to meet you where you are and lead you toward your dreams.”
Shiresh raises his hand.
“That will be all,” I say and leave.
Floating down the hallway I see several students that should be in my class huddled by the bathrooms and laughing at some loud video on a phone.
“Shouldn’t you all be in class?”
They spin and, registering me floating there, disperse in random, halting patterns like squirrels.
“No running in the atrium!” shouts our campus police officer, approaching from the atrium.
I rub my brow in consternation and, again, the students simply vanish.
“Wow,” the campus officer—is he Tyler?—says. “That was a close call.”
We stare at each other.
He says, "Good thing you're, uh, magic."
I nod. Our conversations are always awkward, owing to his having several times dressed me down for smoking outside the yellow tape.
“Well, Lucas, just let me know if y’all need anything.” He walks the wrong way down the hallway toward the shuttered vocational wing of the building, turns after ten paces, and gives me an embarrassed smirk as he walks back into the atrium.
~
I go back to my office hours. Waiting outside my office is a smiling man and woman close to my age, the man thin and gangly and the woman short with oily curls and a ruffled black blouse. They are married, religious, and religiously attend my morning section of Early World Literature. They present me at the beginning of each class with a list of things I’ve forgotten to do, failed to explain, discrepancies in my materials, and, sometimes, mock-cheerful comments on my rumpled personage, my tired, incredulous, beseeching eyes.
“We came by your office to ask about the midterm,” he says.
“But you weren’t here," she says.
“It says you’re always here.”
“But you weren’t here.”
“We asked up front and Mr. Tattle said you should be in your office. He called you.”
“But you weren’t here.”
“We called the main Campus in Clarksville. They said they checked your hours, and you were supposed to be here, but you weren’t.”
“So, they gave us the college president’s personal cell number and we called her.”
They both cross their arms in unison, say in unison, “She said we should go wait here and let her know when you return.”
I look them both long in the eyes, flitting my glance between their unwavering, affronted, wolfish glares, and I reach to press my temples and channel the effluence of my energies, but they squint in tandem and rub their temples, too, and with a crack like lightning and an unpleasant ripping sensation, I find myself immaterialized and hurtling through a purple-black cold vortex loud as a jet engine and rattling with stinging hail.
Then I come to on my hands and knees in gravel, and I look up, and all around me it’s parking lot, far as I can see in every direction. And I collect myself, stand and dust off my trousers. My cigarettes and lighter are in my pocket. Over there I see some students I recognize from last Spring cheering and leaning over a game of craps under halogen streetlamps. There are no trash cans, no bees.
I follow the gaze of the anti-feminist who’s perched on a truck gate–she’s watching the ambulations of the honest-to-Jesus real life Socrates, unmistakably ugly and be-robed, and I approach the master to ask: “What are you doing here?”
He swivels his chin, his neck creaking, regards me with no little wisdom. “What are any of us doing here?”
“You don’t belong here in the liminal parking lot.”
“Who belongs anywhere?”
He’s committed to his shtick. But he’s also glowing and I assume he might be in charge. “Look, I don’t belong here. I have more to offer. I’ve given everything to my students.”
“Is that what they need?”
“They need something.”
“From you?”
“Do you want to see my CV? I graduated from one of U.S. News and World Report’s Best Value Colleges!”
He wrinkles his nose. “Could your parents not afford you the proper tutors?”
“My parents weren’t rich.”
“Do you think knowledge is the purview of the rich alone?”
“Do you?” I give him a taste of his own medicine. He loves it. It’s yummy and he smiles and rubs his belly. And it dawns on me, this guy doesn’t know anything. He’s just a weird asshole.
All the same, I want a selfie. When I put my arm around him for the shot, he goes rigid. One of us smells like serious BO. He only frowns as I snap a couple of pics, then trudges away.
I call after him: “I just met Aristotle. He was way smarter.”
Socrates creaks back around. “Fuck that guy. He stole all my ideas.”
When he's out of earshot I say, “What a jerk” to the anti-feminist.
She looks up from her phone. “Was that Julius Caesar?”
“Yes.” What difference does it make?”
“Is it true? Did the other guy steal his ideas?”
“I don't know.”
“Did you read their like whatever? Stuff?
I try to give her a withering look, but it’s probably more a gawk of shame and terror. “Yes. Some. A little. Not really,” I stammer. “No one does.”
Right?
She shrugs. “That's like the problem. Like how do you know? Stuff, I mean.”
I’m so sweaty. Isn’t it hot in this parking lot? I mumble, “I don't think anyone's figured that out.”
She's not listening anymore. My phone dings. It’s a note from HR welcoming our newest English Instructor, Arastotel.
Another ding. Peg somehow has my number and has sent me a video of herself hovering a solid foot over my desk and pontificating to my enthralled students. All are smiling and some are high-fiving and you can really sense they’re learning a lot. I click the play arrow and she pronounces, “Those who’ve failed you offer to be there,” and she imitates perfectly my doltish low mumble: “There! There? There, there.”
My students shake their heads; I am too, in the parking lot. She’s really got my number.
Now she looks directly into the camera: “When what we really need is here,” she points to her head, “and here,” to her heart.
Ooh. I suck my teeth. She’s good.
I want to send the Socrates selfie to her in retort, but now there’s no service. I throw my cell phone up into the air and it keeps going and going up into the clouds. “Wow,” says the anti-feminist. “Look at it go.”
So, we do.
Lucas Flatt's work has appeared in X-R-A-Y Lit, Pithead Chapel, Roi Fainéant, and Maudlin House, among other fine literary establishments. He has been longlisted in the 2026 Jeanne Leiby Chapbook Award and won the 2016 Larry Brown Short Story award at Pithead Chapel, and teaches at Volunteer State Community College. He lives with Merry, Ira, and Susie in Tennessee.
