The classroom where the dead show up late

I'm taking attendance and the back row keeps filling with people who never made it — kids who died at 14 in some war a century ago, a woman burned for heresy, a poet who wrote one good line and then vanished. They all know my name. I ask them why they're here and they say, 'You kept talking about us like we were still doing something.' The bell rings, and they don't leave; they just get quieter. Then I wake up and the zero hour is still three hours away, and I think — yeah, that's the whole job, isn't it.