A woman is giving a lecture. She is presenting on the neurological implications of myocardial infarctions and her attending is watching. She is young enough for 24, thin and well put-together. Her hair is slicked back. Her panties are on backwards but no one can tell.

She is giving a lecture with a steady voice. The jagged terminology of medicine rolls over her tongue, which has a hint of an accent to it. You could hear it in the R’s and T’s. Her attending is aware of this, as are her patients. She has been made aware of this by one of the other residents, who unprofessionally corrected her pronunciation of a word. Since then, she has been taking speech lessons.

A woman is giving a lecture and anticipating its end. She can already see the porcelain-blank faces of the crowd and hear their porcelain-blank applause. Everything about the lecture hall is hygienic, but designed with taste. There is an awkward bright light glaring at her.

Afterwards, her expression will not change to acknowledge the applause. Maybe she’ll tip her head slightly forward in gratitude. At night, she will come home to her apartment and consider the inflections in speech she should have made. At night, her boyfriend will call her and ask her about her day. She will take a shower, wash her breasts with soap, and prepare for the next day.

Tomorrow, she will wake up to an email from her attending. The next day, she will call her mother. Soon, her residency will end and she’ll move back home to her boyfriend, or husband, or what have you.

A woman is giving a lecture. She is sitting, because these things are done sitting down. The room is nice, she thinks, and she cracks a few jokes on the instability of Buffalo weather. Buffalonians love their weather, for better or worse. It’s a sure-fire way to appeal to the audience.

She is giving a talk on Joyce’s Epiphanies in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Her papers are scattered on the table and this makes her seem more relatable. She is astonished at the uniformity of the crowd, plaid and patterned shirts, short hair and funky glasses. She herself has a pair of DKNY’s she got on sale. She notices the man in the back of the room noticing her, and makes eye contact as she theorizes the nature of the moment of epiphany.

She is giving a talk and the men here wear tight pants. To clarify a topic, she expostulates with Freudian terminology, and some heads in the audience bob along. She makes the neurotic decision to cut a whole page of her paper and tells the audience about it. A professor jokingly calls out something about the moment and the scene of cutting. She pretends to understand and pretends to chuckle. She has learned to tolerate hecklers.

She announces with a shrug that her time is up. There is hearty applause and the floor is opened up for questions. Grad students dig deep from their wells of stored knowledge and formulate a question. Their eyes roll upward and pretend to search the ceiling for the right term. Elegant young female professors provide questions and comments. The old men praise her. She has learned to speak their language.

She will come home to her dog of seven years, to her boyfriend of five. He will have made dinner and she will do the dishes. At night they will sip wine or gourmet beer and play Monk in their small apartment. It will feel big because they will turn up the volume. After a certain hour, they will retire to separate rooms and secretly complain about the terror of their dissertations. Tomorrow morning, she will make him coffee. The next day, he will ask her to marry him.

A woman is giving a lecture. She is 35 years old and her children have spilled the milk. It is too late for them to get a new bowl before school, and she is at risk of missing the donuts and coffee in the teacher’s lounge. She is giving a lecture because she is frustrated that they’re not listening. Their little faces are round like apples. She feels a pang of guilt and lets out a sigh.

She is giving a lecture the way she learned in class, with simple words and clear diction. She talks to kids like they are her students. She is giving a lecture on the Age of Industrialism and the role of women. In a minute she will quiz them on Britain in the Eighteenth Century.

She lectures with flare, with dedication. She lectures desperately, the way an old women recites Hail Mary’s. She lectures in voices to the younger grades, draws diagrams for the older ones. She waves her arms and remembers the times she played a mime on stage and made you believe it. It’s the same sort of thing now.

Her kids stare at her with sleep on their lids and laugh at her gestures. Her children love their mommy and humor her in the same way. In the morning, she fixes them sandwiches in little brown bags. In the morning, she makes toast for her husband and he kisses her cheek paternally. In the morning, she collates her lesson plans and dreads the seventh grade boys’ fifth period.

She is lecturing while the sun sails across the giant square windows. It hits the American flag in a way perfect for the Pledge of Allegiance. At the end of the day, a student asks her for an extension on the final paper. The paper is about women in the workplace. She smiles as she says yes.

In the afternoon, she will marinate the chicken so it will be ready by the time her husband gets back from work. At night, she will make her children set the table and then afterwards she’ll make them help with the dishes. Her husband will take out the trash and pick her flowers from the garden. She’ll smile, kiss him on the lips, and put them in a vase.

Tomorrow, she will put them by a window and add fresh water. She has a cup of tea before she goes to bed.