Guterman in 4B is an actual mapmaker, by his own admission.
Effie Simmons in 3A is not a tech whiz—she doesn’t see so well.
Ike Musa in 4A has a new cat and he’s not telling anyone.
Melissa Johnson in 2A has always thought her name was too plain, too drab a container for her ideas, which tend toward thinking hard about the sun until the old ideas fade away, and that’s what she has spent the morning doing, not rolling back the blind and looking directly at it, she knows that’s potentially ruinous, not just for optic reasons but for psychological ones, but rather hanging an image of the sun in the center of her mind, rushing hard into it with a mix of jubilation and terror so that it falls, not breaking, not bouncing, just falling, and then leaping upon the way a soldier in a war movie leaps upon a grenade that has been lobbed into the midst of the platoon, knowing there will come a moment when the sun on the floor of her mind explodes and fills her with both light and heat, knowing too that the sense of things that follows that detonation will be more complete than anything she has yet to experience, an ecstasy that cannot be captured by language, that she will have to leave that ecstasy burning there in her mind, more than an ember, an engine, rattling her teeth, sharpening her sight, both creating and filling cavities in her skull, in her body, or at the very least what her mind still remembers of these things, remnants of the physical world, figments, and she is calling out names as she slips further into the state that will produce that sense of things, calling out her own name.
Brenda Mattsson in 5A is making herself lunch.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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