One chili pepper: You feel the heat rising, your skin dampening. It’s bearable, might even be welcome on a cold day, perhaps on some snowy mountain in the Alps, like your blood has become hot cocoa. But not here with the students in front of you, silent as construction workers are now when you walk past. No one has done the reading. They haven’t even bothered with an AI summary. They look at you, the older lady, which you know is how they think of you, at the front of the room, getting all lathered up about irrelevant things, like the demise of critical thinking, falling literacy rates, and the distinction between women plural with an e and woman singular with an a. 

Two chili peppers: The sweat begins to pool in the creases of your elbows, your cleavage. It beads on your upper lip. Attendance is sparse. A rumor about ICE has some students legitimately afraid to come to class. You hate the part of you that suspects the rumor, that some use it as an excuse. The students who are there thumb at their phones, their heads lowered. At least, you think, they can’t see you sweating. 

Three chili peppers: The sweat seeps through your clothing at your arm pits, at your belly which strains the waistline of what used to be a loose-fitting dress. Your hair frizzes from the humidity of your own scalp. You want them to appreciate the slow, the difficult, the discomfort of not knowing, but you’re speeding inside, wishing you could quit, though retirement is still too faint a dot on the horizon. A student holds their phone up. Your university is turning in names for suspicious activities to the government, which defines “suspicious” much more loosely than your dress ever fit. You worry they are filming you. You worry what you’re saying is suspicious. 

Four chili peppers: Sweat forms rivulets on your forehead and drips into your eyes, making it hard to see the young bodies before you. If you shook like a wet dog, you might splatter them. Would that reach them, you wonder. Would that wake them up? Woke, though, is now a bad word. And what might waking do? Force them to bear witness to the continued horrors of the world, to the fact that we are consciously opting to plug into the Matrix, let computers do our thinking while the very rich pit the rest of us against one another, while the Earth burns, even hotter than you do. Your days are numbered, but they have so many still ahead. You feel for them, but they can’t see that. They can’t see that your skin is hot enough to melt ice, that your blood is hot enough to scald anyone who dares bite you.