The woman who stepped out was — thick, was the word, was the accurate word, the word that contained the full meaning of what it described: thick through the waist and the hips and the thighs, the body of a woman who existed at a scale that rooms generally noticed. She wore teacher's clothes — not formal, not casual, the specific middle register of someone who had thought about dressing for a room full of six-year-olds and had landed somewhere practical. Her dark hair was pulled back. Her face was the face of a woman in her late thirties who had seen enough rooms and people and situations to no longer be performing anything.
She descended the two steps to the pavement and looked at the woman with the canvas.
"'Morning,'" she said. Her English was accented — Korean underneath it, the accent that had clearly been living in English for a long time but kept its origin. "'I'm the new teacher. Hana. I wanted to introduce myself before the term started properly.'"
The woman blinked.
