Average School Day

John lumbered out the front door into a morning frost that made his bones ache from the inside out. He was eleven minutes late. This was no unusual occurrence. Some of the toasted maple leaves swung wildly on their stems in the September wind, hanging on with their few last fibers in protest of the inevitable liberation. The cold was well premature for Connecticut this time of year. John had neglected or forgotten (it was nearly impossible to distinguish which) to wear an overcoat, and clutched his torso with blue-white hands.

“Jeez it’s fuckin cold,” he muttered into a tuft of frosty breath, eyes half open.

The car door took some effort to budge from the ice, and in his struggles John observed the strange star-like patterns of frost littered across the hood of his Camry. He tried to connect this phenomenon with something he had learned in chemistry a year earlier, but failed to recall anything on the arrangement of water molecules in solid form.

“So then her cousin Ty shows up dude, out of the blue, just to check on the beach house. What are the chances this time of year? I had to jump out a goddamn window into a hedge without any pants on. Screwed up my knee.” Dodge was John’s best friend. He always told stories first period while they pretended to learn Post WWII American History with an unbelievable vivacity for eight o’clock in the morning. Usually they were about girls he almost laid or got to go down on him. The stories never seemed to cease, but John was a really good listener.

“That’s crazy man… crazy.”

At this point, John had become more familiar with the carpets at B. High than anything else. He was a chronic sloucher, the result of which was a downward perspective on the world. It was not an act of shyness or anything of the sort; rather a naturally awkward posture. Walking the halls, John would always trace the esoteric carpet patterns and let his mind run away with them. His stride would assume a rhythm so as not to step on the gaps, etc.

This hobby, of course, took a backseat when any of the girls on Dodge’s “Top 25” list happened to be walking in front of him. On such an occasion, John’s trademark slouch served a perfect cover to admire the finer points of the contours in Lauren Fitch’s jeans. He even had the stitch patterns on the back pockets memorized according to brand. By this indicator he was more apt to tell you what day of the week it was than by looking at a calendar.

Such was the trail John followed on this morning back to the locker bay when something caught his attention. A herd of students were gravitating to the corner of the dining commons near the main exit. Several of them were streaming through the middle with their coats and backpacks, apparently leaving the building at 11am.

“That’s peculiar.”

The remaining students were corralled on either side of the exit flow, their attention tuned to the giant news-ticker-apparatus situated awkwardly on the wall between two sound-absorbing panels and underneath the Bangladesh flag (every world flag hung around the dining commons as if it were the UN). The school had invested 11 grand in this clunky scoreboard the previous year, and John couldn’t even read it from across the common.

“What a god awful investment.” he thought aloud.

On the way to his locker, John passed a few of his friends playing poker or hearts in the adjacent bay, as was the norm.

“You guys know why everyone’s leaving?”

Simon Bohr, a Ritalin-gobbling pointdexter who ran a meth lab in his basement, as it were, looked up from his cards with a blank stare.

“Oh... a plane just collided with the Statue of Liberty or something,”

Brian Heinrich, a slightly more rational individual, interjected:

“‘Or something?’ It was the World Trade Center, you junky.”

“How could they make that mistake, there are a million flights into New York everyday?”

John cut across the commons, weaving the lunch tables and a few kids wearing wool hats, playing hacky-sack and giggling like assholes. The crowd watching the ticker had gotten much bigger. There were at least a hundred kids staring up at that damn thing like a UFO just landed. Dodge was there.

“What’s the deal, man?” John queried, feigning oblivion.

“They’re saying someone hijacked a plane and flew it into the twin towers, dude,” he returned, devoid of the spunk that fueled every first period story. “Bobby and Joey Mellon’s mom came in and pulled them out of class. She was jabbering about nukes within a 500 mile radius or some shit.”

“Jesus,” was all John could muster. He didn’t really know what this meant. No immediate reaction happened beside the verbal acknowledgment.

On the outskirts of the crowd stood Lauren Fitch. John spotted her; she was sobbing into her hands. He remembered from a conversation in economics that Lauren’s dad worked in the city's financial district. Now his eyes couldn’t stray from her face, which resembled a tiger’s on account of the tear streaks running down her artificially bronzed cheeks.

“Jesus,” he said to himself, and this time he really meant it.

None of John’s teachers said anything about the news in his remaining classes, but the lessons they gave were mostly empty ones. Nobody could concentrate. Mr. Freund was even more distant than usual, and Mrs. Elperina, one great big giant Russian heart of a physics teacher, spent the period telling a story about her escape from the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War. John had always paid attention in physics since he liked Mrs. Elperina. Somehow he realized the look on her face now was the same one she must have had while watching Gorbachev on T.V. He doubted that he would ever fully understand thermodynamics.

The ride home was off-putting for John. The sun beamed high in a cloudless sky and it was at least 30 degrees warmer – practically t-shirt weather. John thought it all very plastic on this particular occasion. Neil Young’s Harvest, to which he’d normally be crooning along behind the luxurious privacy of the dashboard, seemed distracting, like white noise on a 3am television. The driver’s seat was itchy; everything was a little off. John wished he could be shivering and stuffing down a stale Nature Valley again, driving back toward the mind-numbing normalcy of an average school day.

For the first time in a long while, John was conscious in the act of opening the front door to his house. He knew what the bolt would sound like as the knob turned and it released. He knew the exact amount of force to use while leaning through, and the proper angle of the wrist for a discreet closure. All this made perfect sense to him, yet strangely it seemed like he was learning it all a second time. At the kitchen table was John’s father and neighbor Bud Dwight from across the street. They were drinking a glass of whiskey.

“Hey there pal,” said John’s father. He immediately turned his attention to the other room. Bud said nothing. His son worked on Wall Street.

He wandered into the family room, where Lisa, Bud’s wife, and John’s mother sat on the couch, ghost-faced and failing to hold back tears. A smoking tower featured on CNN with a pile of white ash beside where its twin used to be. The tickers and headlines blended into one useless globule of intersecting text to the point that John had no interest in reading them. He knew it was all early speculation anyway. Besides, the picture said a lot.

The quiet in the house became unbearably eerie. Even Molly, their yappy dog was sleeping on an armchair. He wanted to speak up but no one seemed ready to say anything. Before he could drive, John would often escape the confusion to the woods behind his house. He decided this course of action would do just as well now.

As he strolled, the crackle of leaves was all that ran through John’s mind. He wanted badly to be appropriately sad, but that seemed impossible. It felt like the world had stopped turning, and everything was a life-size porcelain model of itself and John was a bird flying low enough to see it all without anything blocking his path. At that moment, he wished it would all crumble.

John’s favorite tree was a big old oak rooted smack in the middle of the woods like the pole of a circus tent. It had a bunch of quirky branch stubs and obscure growths lacing the trunk. There were a few planks nailed rusty into one of the larger branches where a tree house that John’s father built him used to stand. John climbed up to the boards and watched a robin procure a meal from the birdfeeder in his mother’s garden. He hadn’t seen his yard from this angle in a long while.

Suddenly, a strong gust of wind came and a cluster of leaves snowed down upon the lawn. The birdfeeder leaned and finally toppled, sending the robin on his way. It was seriously cold again.

“Gonna be a long winter,” John sighed as he leapt from the weathered boards where his refuge used to stand and went to fix the disorder in the garden.

Oakend (C.P. Night)

Old bus receipt, we boot the hills at dusk
A lonely photograph home on the desk
She waves slowly and marches in reverse
Her damage done; the pounding in my head

Intangible – record new document
When wined-up ghosts fly forth from head to foe
My eyes don’t meet their shifty cocaine gaze
They chase their trains and say “I am the King.”

Horn ornaments hang round a winding tree
His jazzy vinyl tablet is a birth
Trumping out the snows, yet wandering lust
This frosted over Charlie Parker night.

Around Fresno

Numerical music
transposed into air, shell-
Spotting turtle hills.
Encyclouds:
a dragon,
Archaeopteryx,
et cetera.

Quiet Oaxaca dancer
(Tornado.)
Planks & iron, by and by
jimmied up to the great spin
Chimney soup.

Orange plains,
gas empty light,
Tomorrow's cumulus.
Joy is an
Apple-smile.
Ultimately the cow is to be hit.