The anatomy professor was so boring that his twenty students, one-by-one, drifted off to sleep five minutes into his lectures. As heads dropped, he continued to discuss the circulatory system, the digestive system, and other topics from the seven-hundred-page book. The professor had the habit of keeping his back to students while drawing chambers of the heart, the large and small intestines, and other internal organs on the whiteboard.
There was something about the monotone lull of his deep voice that incited slumber. Word got out. Apparently, many professors and staff at the university suffered from lack of sleep. First, Dr. Lilly Burks showed up in the anatomy class. Dr. Burks, a postmodernist in the philosophy department, was in the midst of menopause and hadn’t had more than two straight hours of sleep in five months. Exhausted and moody, Anatomy was her last resort.
Sure enough, three minutes into the professor’s discussion of cytology, Lilly’s eyes shut completely and loud snoring could be heard from the back row. A few students laughed. Others closed their eyes. Pleasant dreams of circulating cells traveled through closed eyes.
Next came the colicky toddlers from the on-campus daycare center. Five of them were strolled in by daycare workers. They were lined up against the back wall. Followed by the Dean of Students, who worried about the decreasing student enrollment. He hadn’t been able to sleep for the entire spring semester. Soon the class was standing room only, so people showed up carrying bed linens.
One day, even the anatomy professor nodded off during a lecture. This, as it turned out, would be his final day of teaching. When he fell, his head hit the hard floor, displaying for the entire overcrowded class his brain’s anatomy. The toddlers, the Dean, Lilly, and the students all woke up screaming as if they were permanently caught in a nightmare.
Maureen Sherbondy’s most recent book is Lines in Opposition (Unsolicited Press, 2022). She has published 10 other poetry books, a short story collection, and a YA novel. www.maureensherbondy.com