Tracy Guzeman was born in Aurora, Illinois. She has twice been a Glimmer Train Top Twenty-Five finalist and her short story “Just Don’t Love You Anymore” was performed as part of the New Short Fiction Series Fourth Annual Emerging Voices Group Show. She lives and works in Northern California. This is her first published piece of fiction. Einstein Tracy Guzeman        The men in his unit had called him Einstein, at first behind his back, but once they saw how little it bothered him, to his face. He’d been teaching high school chemistry when he got called up. It wasn’t that he knew so much. They just seemed to know extraordinarily little. After a while, he started feeling like a trained monkey, delivering the goods on demand. Hey, Einstein. Smithy says ask you what the five factory medals are. And Smithy, with a tad more intelligence than the rest of them, saying, “It’s refractory metals, you idiot—not factory medals.”        Now, his head encased in gauze like a piece of fine chocolate, he tried to remember everything—anything—he knew. Five refractory metals. Rhenium. Niobium. Tantalum. Spoon. Felicia. That wasn’t right. Rhenium. Niobium. Chrysanthemum. Felicia. A nurse leaned over. The smell of her, all bleach and isopropyl alcohol, made his eyes water.        “What is this?” she asked again, holding up a pencil. “Try not to get frustrated.”        You’re a cow, he thought.        “Pencil,” he said. But between his brain and mouth the word twisted like a snake and shed its skin, morphing into something different. Shoe was what came out of him; the shhh drawn out like an exhalation of final breath.        “Again,” she said, maybe an edge of exasperation creeping into her voice. He recalled standing in front of his students, practically willing them to grasp what he thought, at the time, was important. Rhenium. Niobium. Felicia. Felicia. Felicia.