Latin Isn’t Dead

Basically no one comes into the pajama store where I work. Every once in a while a tourist will squint over the display, taking it in as another one of our city’s puzzling landmarks, but most of the time it’s just me and my supervisor, Anetka, who recently had her head shaved. Anetka says people have nicely shaped heads, a fullness in the back that looks good without hair. She does look stunning in muscle but I disagree. My brother has twenty-seven staples in his head, if he ever shaved it, he’d look like a vase glued together in a museum, fullness be damned. That was the joke in our family: Ron, please don’t shave your head! Then he’d get the buzzer from the medicine cabinet and we’d heckle him like it was the WWE. We only had this one joke, we had to make the most of it. I had to make the most of it because secretly I believed my teacher when she said, Latin isn’t dead, only dormant! I would dream about Latin, who I pictured as my brother with his head shaved, come back to get us, to make us pay for forgetting him all these years.

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Delia Pless teaches writing at Columbia College and DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois. She holds a Bachelor's degree in comparative literature from New York University and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Her work has appeared in jubilat, Prelude, LIT, Sixth Finch, Western Beefs of North America, and elsewhere. Visit her online: www.deliapless.com