Tuesday, February 24, 2009

The Dream

In her dream, she's handing in a math quiz.

She looks out the window as she settles back in her seat. Outside, it's storming. Lightning strikes the oak in the courtyard, fusing together a squirrel and a bird. They tumble to the ground and struggle to get separated. The bird twitches its feet.

The teacher calls her to the front of the room with a frown on his face and her paper in his hand - her quiz, marred with red pen. Didn't you read the directions? he asks her, they explicitly say to perform the integration at standard temperature and pressure.

She wakes up drenched in sweat.

School the next day is shaky. She pours over the math quiz instructions and finds not a single hint of chemistry. She laughs it off. Finishing with her quiz just a few moments to spare, she looks over her work. Something is wrong. Instead of positives and negatives, she wrote sharps and flats.

Things get worse from there.

She's learning about Ksp values in third period. She can't stop thinking about sulfuric acid on the staff paper - a diminished chord, she decides. She tries to find the volume of Brahm's Quartet No. 5 if it's rotated about the y-axis. Instead of taking notes on Dos Palabras she finds herself analyzing the syntax of her Spanish-to-English Dictionary. She writes a DBQ on the French Revolution as it relates to Heron's Law. Lines start blurring everywhere. She accidentally makes out with her brother and calls her boyfriend "mom". She slurps her soup with a fork. She sharpens a pen.

That night, lying under her bed, she knows it can't go on. She sneaks downstairs and writes out a suicide note in Spanish with an eraser, and then, sitting at the kitchen table, her hair pulled back into a ponytail, her eyes squeezed tightly shut, she presses the gun to her forehead and pulls the trigger, gently drenching herself with a water pistol.

4 comments:

Ello Shertzer said...

Hahahahahaha that was great! I love it! The ending is especially terrific!

Raptor said...

Definitely didn't see that end coming!

Great work, as usual!

Ali said...

hahaha holy shit
that ending was scary for me
because last night i had a dream where I got shot.
it kinda sucked.

Anonymous said...

Calculate the number of girls in third period chem who are musical and take Spanish.

Answer: WALL-E