“The language is there to use.” He knew that. “It’s a tool furnished us for our elevation, edification, and illumination.” He knew that, too. But there was something else that wasn’t being said. He racked his brain. He drummed his fingers. He closed his eyes for a nanocentury, considered the growth he had experienced (three beard-seconds and counting) and opened them up again. Nothing around him had changed in its essence. Syreena was still sitting to one side of him, meticulously annotating. Barry was still sitting to the other side, humming disco. And yet he was rested. And yet he was changed. He was revived, able to locate and love the truth, which is that what was missing was a sense of play. He stood, forgetting the lecture hall around him, forgetting what had come before, the prison in which he had served six years for robbery, the small room whose door his mother locked when she cried, which was always, the crib with too-high rails. “I’ve had a perfectly lovely day,” he said. “But this isn’t it.” The faces tilted up at him, Syreena and Barry and a few more, had been that way since he stood. Their average expression hung between approbation and opprobrium. He pointed at the ceiling and called out his own name. Whatever grade he was getting in the class wasn’t good enough.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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