As he was walking to his first hour classroom, Paul felt the temperature rise slowly until it was bordering on uncomfortable.  Glancing at his watch, he saw that the passing period was rapidly coming to a close.  He sped up his pace, but was still not in the room as the bell rang.  He uttered a naughty word under his breath and slowed down again.  No use rushing when he was already late.  He entered the classroom and dumped his books unceremoniously on his desk.

     The desk melted.  There was no other word for it.  Seconds after his books had hit, they began sinking through the surface until they fell through entirely and lay heaped on the floor.  The desk then proceeded to liquefy and flow down onto the sad heap of books on the floor.  Even the metal legs and the blue plastic chair melted.  Within ten seconds, the desk had been reduced to a slowly hardening multi-colored puddle that oozed out ponderously, like syrup.

     “Paul?” said a voice.  Suddenly the desk was intact again, his books sitting just as they had fallen. The voice spoke again and snapped Paul back fully.  Seth was waving his hand in front of Paul’s eyes.

    “Yoo-hoo, Paul?  Wake up, Paul.  Welcome back, have a nice nap?”

     “The desk melted,” Paul stated matter-of-factly.  It got very quiet in the room just then.  Seth didn’t know quite how to respond, so he nodded vaguely and sat back down.  Paul prodded his chair with the eraser of his pencil and cautiously planted his butt in it when he thought it was safe.  He watched the desktop intently in case it tried to run away or eat his books.

     “Clear your desks,” said Mr. Riemann as he walked in the door and kicked out the doorstop.  He grabbed a stack of papers from his desk and began distributing them.  Paul looked over the exam.  He didn’t have a clue about ninety percent of the material and was only vaguely sure about the other ten percent.  The one thing he knew for sure was his name, but the date eluded him skillfully and he had to check his watch, which was not acting correctly.  The second hand was zipping along at about twice its normal speed.  This was contrasted by the odd behavior of the minute hand, which was moving at a nice little clip in the opposite direction.  The hour hand just twitched pathetically between two of the little hash marks between the eight and the nine.  The small LCD window said the date was the twentieth day of the thirteenth month in the year Eighty-nine.  Paul decided it was just the battery going dead and began struggling through the test.

     Because he didn’t know any of the material, Paul finished quickly and had a lot of time to kill.  Of course, he wouldn’t know that, because his watch was still behaving erratically, to say the least.  A month and forty-seven days had passed, making it the sixty-seventh of whatever the fourteenth month happened to be in 1179.  Paul sat for several minutes watching his watch go ballistic and wondering why it was so hot. What a strange morning, Paul thought, first the shaking, then the heat, then my friggin’ desk melted, and now my watch is possessed or something.  No one else seems to notice anything weird.  Maybe I need to cut down on the caffeine.  He immediately banished this thought and started doodling on a piece of paper.  He wiped a thin layer of sweat from his forehead, but it was back within minutes.  Frustrated, he poked Seth in the shoulder with his pencil.

     “Is it hot in here?,” he asked.

     “No, actually I’m pretty cold.  Besides, it isn’t hot enough in here to melt a desk.”

     “I could’ve sworn it had melted.  I think I need more sleep.  By the way,” Paul held up his arm, “ is my watch acting oddly?  Can you tell the time and date?”

     Seth looked at the watch.  “Eight-fifty and twenty-three seconds AM on the twenty-seventh of February, 1997.”

     Paul looked, but the watch was still on the fritz.  “Um, sure, yeah.”

     “Why, do you think it’s running backwards and telling you it’s the ninetieth of May?”

     “Lord, no.  Nothing that drastic.”  The date was, as anyone knew, the -23rd of the third, fourth, and fifth months in the year 1203.  Duh.  Paul decided to spend the last 800 years of class reading.  He picked up 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was required reading for his seventh hour class.  He’d read it many times before, but never when the words actually burst into flame.  The pages stayed intact and untouched, but the words burned brightly and hotly.  Paul yelled a curse and threw the book to the floor.  He was in the middle of stomping on it repeatedly when he realized he’d become the center of attention.

     “Er, heh-heh.  Don’t you just hate it when the words in your book catch on fire spontaneously?” The class frowned as one and shook their heads as the bell rang.  Paul left as quickly as he could.

     “LSD much, Paul?” said Loren.

     “No, actually.”

     “Sure,” said Loren. “Of course you don’t.  What was I thinking?  I’m sure your melting desk wasn’t some drug induced hallucination.  It was real.  Okay.”

     “Shaddap.” Paul grumbled.  Loren laughed and entered the bathroom. Even though it wasn’t a tradition of his particular religion, Paul crossed himself, said a quick prayer in case anyone was listening, and mentally braced himself for art class.  Which, Paul thought to himself, could be extremely interesting.

part 4