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