Elizabeth Cox is the author of three novels, including The Ragged Way People Fall Out of Love, and the story collection Bargains in the Real World. She teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars and at Wofford College in South Carolina, where she shares the John C. Cobb Endowed Chair in the Humanities with her husband, C. Michael Curtis. Cox lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Photograph by Carolynne Bailey.

Live Dangerously!

A Story

by Elizabeth Cox

Eric walked into the classroom a few minutes late. The class had been talking about Zarathustra for a week now. The professor was saying that according to Nietzsche one person’s virtue was another person’s vice, but he stopped talking until Eric was seated. Eric took the only seat left, behind the long-legged, dark-haired girl he had noticed several times both in this class and on campus, and whose name, he knew, was Samantha. When he sat down beside her, he leaned slightly forward and took in the scent of her shampoo.

Eric took notes on the propositions doled out by the professor about Nietzsche’s claim against religion: God is dead; We must go against the Moral Rules of the Herd; Create your own Moral Order. “Live Dangerously!”

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