In the bright foyer beneath them, the Editor was being feted. The room had been lit with hundreds of candles, which was an expense, the Professor told Dolores, the student librarian, that the university would not have spared for a lesser personage. On the tables there were stacks of the latest issue of the Editor’s literary journal. His colleagues were all there, in suits. Even the Dean had been enjoying himself.

Dolores had drawn the curtains and the library was dark. They could hear the sound of carousing from the party downstairs. The Professor brandished the journal he had taken from the launch at Dolores. The cover of the issue was a bright and garish red.

In their city, the Editor was famous for taking something long and making it short. She uncovered writers, sometimes great ones, and then she pruned them. The Professor had been reading her journal for years, in secret of course, and in all that time he had never seen anything longer than three pages of double-spaced type. The stories themselves were veiled and trivial. They were quick, much too quick, everything very brief and hush-hush. It was, he said, as if they were unwilling to reveal themselves, to give anything up.

Although he had never told anyone but Dolores, the Editor was the Professor’s greatest enemy. At the party he had hung back as if ashamed to have found himself attending. His colleagues flocked around the Editor as if they were about to hear a sermon. This was nothing new. All at once their time seemed to have become hers. His students at the university discussed her in whispers between their lectures, and every event the Editor headlined sold out in seconds. It was clear that the Professor was being left behind. His classes were diminishing in size and his own journal received fewer submissions each year. Feeling abandoned, the Professor had walked over to the table with its pile of red books. He had flipped through the journal as if in a reverie, stopping here and there to pull up a sentence or two, and noting, with displeasure, the extreme subtlety of the prose. Contrived! Deliberately opaque! Smug! The stories’ reticence grated on the Professor. He liked to be shown around. He liked to see a slow, stately narrative. The longer events took to unfold, the better.

“Some writing is a little bit like sleuthing,” the Professor would say to his students. “The author is trying to understand his characters. He thinks about people, what they’d say, what they’d read, what they’d dream about. He wants to know their histories, the exact sequence of events that has led them to this point, this inclination, this inescapable act. This kind of writing is empathetic, realistic. When we read this type of fiction, we check it against the world we know. Together it adds up to a series of exhaustive but quickly outdated maps. It shows the reader what they might have found out for themselves in an infinity of possible lives.”

The students before him would listen closely.

“There is another kind of writing,” he would continue, looking each of them in the eye. “Here the characters are subordinate to the sentence and where it wants to go. Their personalities are decided by external arrangements, constellations of symbol, metaphor, allegory, or the unexpected harmonies discovered between certain groupings of words. We see them only in snatches. They are obscured by other, more definite shapes. Here, every clause is a character of its own. In this kind of writing, the writer pretends to act as a conduit for universal truths. She approaches them through indirection; she lets us see them sideways. Works like this are riddled with gaps and omissions. The reader had to fill them in as best as they can. This is the worst and most faithless kind of writing.”

It was at this point that he would lose their attention, and the Professor couldn’t be sure that Dolores was listening to him either. Her face in the dim library was a triangle of shadow. He leaned forward and switched on the glass lamp that stood on the low table between their two chairs. His former student was watching him with her empty grey eyes. When she had attended his seminars on rhetoric, Dolores had remained silent while all the others shared their opinions. At the end of the year, he had failed her, but she hadn’t held it against him. At the end of another year, he had slandered her, telling the others that she was the worst student librarian the university had ever seen, but she hadn’t held it against him then, either. In time the Professor had come to consider her his only friend.

Eventually, the Professor told Dolores, his eye had been caught by a particular page.

It contained a story about two gardeners: an old man and an old woman. The old man let his garden run wild, but the old woman grew her plants in pots. The descriptions of the old man’s garden were lush, vivid—there were hyacinths, banana plants, heliconia! —and the Professor had read on appreciatively. However, the sentences that described the old woman’s garden were short and unpleasant, full of abrupt turns of phrase and metaphors that set out to startle. Her garden was ugly and her flowerbeds were cut into small, quiltish squares. Everything was orderly and constrained. Unfortunately, the two gardens bordered one another. The gardeners were siblings and had inherited a large, spacious house from their parents. Soon after their mother’s funeral they had divided the family home in two, and from that moment on brother and sister hadn’t exchanged a single word. They hadn’t needed to. Their gardens spoke for them.

The Professor had switched on the table lamp without changing the composition of the library in any significant way. The shadows were solidifying into a desperate, restless army, jostling at the edges of their small circle of light.

He had shivered all over, the Professor told Dolores, because it had never crossed his mind that the Editor might feel the same disapproval towards his methods as he did towards hers. He hadn’t been prepared to find his position represented in the journal itself. It was as if she had preempted his critique of her. It was as if she had seen straight through him. He had been disturbed at the thought that perhaps the others did too––that the smiling partygoers had been watching him as he leafed through the journal with his look of displeasure, that they had seen the moment when his eyes had alighted on that page, when he had been drawn in, against his better judgement, by her style and her story, for sometimes what emerged from the tyranny of her editing was well-crafted and beguiling, a perfect example of her form, and the composite animal of the Editor and her writer was in fact wonderful, a marvel, something that could have never existed in nature…

The Professor returned to the page. How sorry the old man felt for his sister’s crippled, struggling plants! At night he imagined their roots pressed up against the smooth ceramic of their pots, and dreamed of cramped, tortured shapes. A wordless anxiety would come over him whenever he glanced over the low wall that separated the two gardens and caught sight of the old woman’s handiwork. Sometimes she was there too, in a sunhat, holding silver shears, and each would labor silently on their gardens almost side by side. However, it was impossible for their eyes to meet—his sister wore sunglasses.

One night, while the old man slept, the old woman gardener climbed over the low wall between their properties and gardened his garden. By the time the old man woke up, everything had been ruined. Yet on complaining to the city administrator, he was surprised to be met with indifference and even hostility. His garden, he was told, had been an eyesore, and the neighbors had hated it. There had been talk of doing something for years, and finally the old woman had taken the initiative. It was much better now, everybody agreed. And it was good that these things had been solved within the family. The old man tried to say something more, but it was too late—the city administrators had already turned his attention to the city’s breaking waterworks, which he could hear thundering in the distance, and in an equally distant corner of his mind, an old marble fountain began to emit great torrential spurts. The story ended on a pathetic note, with the old man sitting alone in the garden, while all around him smug, self-satisfied flowers twined up wooden poles.

A tight feeling had come over the Professor as he read the final words. Now the Professor understood that the male gardener’s “work” had been, for the most part, simply a question of letting nature take its course. His own trick was simply that he had continued to happen upon fertile squares of soil. Their city was full of barren gardens that would not grow under his care, but which had taken shape under hers. And over the years his own garden had gone to rack and ruin; he had been too busy watching the Editor’s bloom. At a loss, the Professor had closed the book. He had noticed, at last, that the image on its cover was that of a gigantic metal snake, coiled and mysterious, poised as if at any moment it would dart its triangular head forward and sink long burnished fangs into the hand of an unsuspecting reader.

After finishing his story, the Professor glanced over at Dolores. She had buried her face in one of the velvet cushions. Though her pale hair reflected the light from the solitary lamp between them, the rest of her body was obscured by shadow. Her shoulders were shaking. Laughter floated up from the party below. The Professor sat there open-mouthed and empty-hearted as Dolores rose from the armchair, walked to the window and pulled back the velvet curtains that separated them from the night. The yellow moonlight flooded in. It occurred to him then, maybe for the first time, that he had never heard her speak before. In the long years of their acquaintance, she had not changed, but he had. Dolores turned to the Professor and gestured for him to join her. Together they looked at the square beneath them and all the things that were in it: the marble fountain, the stone slabs covered in green moss, the rectangular flowerbeds, and the cloisters crowding around with their wide, gaping mouths… The window was open––Dolores had forgotten to close it––and so they leaned over the edge, so far out that they were almost falling, the pale girl and the ashen old man who stared up at the sky while the stars shivered above with the clouds thrown up around them like so much moveable scenery.