A Wild Surmise

The Test

108 The Test 1 My students bend intently over their desks, the test questions swirling around their heads, the answers gathering or slipping away. I have taken them to the wall in The Handmaid’s Tale where Margaret Atwood hung the bleeding bodies. I have taken them there and forced them to touch the red-brown O’s of mouths now silenced. I have held in front of them the photos of the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory girls flying through the air, unnecessary angels. I have held the photos before them like a Veronica holding the sweated and bloody face of the Christ printed on her scarf. Touch these wings, I demand. Touch the concrete before these women smash against it like bags of groceries you’d spill going into your house— they are full of life, not bread and wine. 2 My students bend over their tests intent on making the right responses. It is required to test them this way but I would rather send them in the patrol car to the frat house 109 with directions to write up the rape. Touch the semen up a co-ed’s ass. How many kinds of semen are there? And let us count the ways it gets around. Here, I say, here is a wound to compare and contrast to no other. Here is a little piece of culture on a swab. Look under the microscope and see this culture growing like a scream in this dish. This red mouth, this is culture’s test of manhood, of womanhood, and this outrage I force into essay form so you can write out what we really know. ...