SERA
“The room holds four hundred people and we have six hundred registered.”
Professor Mensah said it with the particular tone she had developed across four months of working together, the tone that communicated significant information without attaching her own assessment of it, which was how she had operated in every academic setting she had ever occupied and which Sera had come to appreciate as a form of professional respect.
Sera looked up from the speaking notes she had been revising at the desk under the window. The symposium was in eleven days and the desk had become, across the preceding weeks, the particular kind of occupied surface that communicated active work rather than accumulation. Three drafts of the opening address. The institute’s formal launch statement. The communica
