Professor Viola Moran sits in her little oak-panalled office, feet tucked up under her as she grades papers, a red pen tucked up in her slippery black hair, keeping it in an impromptu bun with another pen in her hand, viciously dancing across the papers of her students, creating harsh slashes of red words in the margins and occasionally the text itself. Normally Professor Moran uses a jolly green or deep purple for her marking, yet today she has found herself in a particularly bad mood for no obvious reason and so she marks in red, her comments reflecting that mood. A pair of round, wire-rimmed glasses perch on the tip of her nose, occasionally slipping, only to be saved at the last moment from falling to her desk and shoved back into place, awaiting the performance to reaper one more in a few minutes.

Unbeknownst to Professor Moran, a thin, gangly student, not unlike those who popular the hallowed halls of her university sits several meters down from her door at the end of the hallway. A book, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, is clenched in one hand as he turns the page absently in perfect mimicry of reading, though who knows? Perhaps he is reading.

Nevertheless, in the left breast pocket of his faux army jacket exactly like the ones that are currently en vogue among the student population there is a phone. It is a a simple flip phone, one that would be considered out of date and unfashionable to this man's affected peers. Yet it is not the sort of phone that anyone else will see, indeed it is only meant to be used once. And so he sits waiting for a call that will tell him whether the woman who marks her student's papers in red ink three doors down from where he sits dies, or if her brother has chosen to give up his life for her.

In the outside pocket of an equally fashionable satchel sits a baton and a pair of medical gloves. The baton, the man knows, will cause a mess on the scratched wooden floor and crammed bookshelves of the office of the woman for whom the baton is intended. But, though not the man's preferred method, it will send a signal to the brother of the woman. 'Look what you've done,' it will say, 'Don't you just feel so guilty?'

The call comes and the young man gets up to leave, book still in his hand, and he walks down the hallway, passed the door where Viola Moran works studiously away. The only sound made as he exits stage left is by the rustle of the book as it falls to the floor outside Professor Moran's door. She does not hear it though, and does not leave her office for several hours, when she receives a phone call telling her that her brother has bashed his head into the mirror of the prison in America where he is incarcerated. When she does find the play, hours later, she will laugh the strangled laugh of someone who thinks that what they're laughing at is absolutely not very funny at all. She will pick the book up and pocket it, shelve it, and forget about it.

Some time later, after tears have been shed, the body has been shipped across the Atlantic and buried in the family plot in Hertfordshire, Viola will open the book, cracking the spine for the first time. She'll be confused when, despite the newness of the book, there will be a page dogeared, something which she rarely does with her books. A line is highlighted menacingly and she reads it over with a shrivelling sense of dread pooling in the pit of her stomach.

She sat like patience on a monument,

Smiling at grief.