SLOHS English teacher Jane Hawley is soon to be District Teacher on Special Assignment, working with new District administrator Leslie O’Connor. Before heading upstairs and out of the classroom, Hawley shared the creative labor of her second trimester Creative Writing elective. Below is the first in a three part series of now published work. Enjoy!

“The White Coat Killer”

The man in the white coat walked down his basement steps. He paused halfway, turning to admire his work in the center of the room. The body was so perfectly laid out on his table, every cut having been made to create perfect symmetry between the right and left sides of the cold, naked woman. The man in the white coat continued down the steps and walked toward his masterpiece. He admired his own work for a few moments longer. The body of the woman was ghostly white, having had all the blood drained from her blood vessels days before. The skin on her abdomen was peeled back in perfect right angles and her legs sawed off parallel to their point of attachment to the rest of the body. Her hair was plastered to her scalp with the use of her own blood, and all her teeth had been spun one-hundred eighty degrees in their canals. The man in the white coat traced his fingers around the woman’s lips as he curled his own into a smile. 

-SLOHS student Sophia Silacci

An Excerpt from Re-Exploring ‘Definition’

My Beloved Martha,

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter yet it so happens that I have little time left. I am sorry for leaving so abruptly and hastily; I needed to discover myself, I am very sorry that it had to come at your expense. 

Excuse my Grammar, it is hard to think with such thin air. 

While writing this letter I sit atop Mount Everest, freezing off what little sense I had left. After all my journeys I haven’t yet discovered what it is that haunts me, what that feeling of ever-looming grief means. Thus I stand atop the world not knowing why or how I got here, only knowing that somehow I tried to do something and once again failed. My apologies Dear, mayhaps I shouldn’t have left you for this nonsensical journey. I just wish that if I come back you would accept me, however I respect you enough to hold you naught accountable for such a thing… 

Sorry Dear, my pen’s frozen ink and my eyes’ frozen tears make writing quite hard. 

I have done much over the last two years. I have taken a humbling humiliation from a mafia, I came to understand the fundamentals of government corruption, I learned from a wise monk that I met in the mountains of tibet. During which you thought that I left you for someone else. I truly am sorry, I should have written to you sooner, though I wanted not to hurt you with what might have seemed like lies. Though right now you deserve the truth: I messed up. I’m sitting atop a mountain shivering, hoping to find what I desire. In the process, my guilt hurt everyone I knew: new acquaintances, old friends, and you.

I have come to realize something that you already knew, I am selfish… 

My deepest sympathies, -The tolerable 
-SLOHS student Ahmed Qandhawi