By Judy Cabito
cup of joe
She separates me from the
tribe with a scorching stare.
I
look away. Try to look absorbed and unavailable, hoping the embers land on
someone else, while I look for a line of defense, demarcation. To camouflage, I
count the panes of glass, the ceiling tiles, the infinite specks of sparkles in
the linoleum floor, then adding worth and value to each, multiplying importance
and dividing that among the inert - one times everything else could equal an
escape plan. I engineer the mass into a Menger Sponge and at last a host of
tortuous origami swans. I make sense of the code of relativity on the blackboard
and arrange the pencils by grades of lead from 1 to 10 while reciting Ptolemy’s
Almagest and Descarte’s La Geometrie. Thus no time to watch the hands on the
clock, multi-tasking agents, plead learned theories against passing
time.
Then her voice.
It
brings on a commotion and everyone shuffles around me, circling the vulnerable
covered wagon. They hold their hands and scalps in prayer amid screams, smoke
signals, and whirling tomahawks. Woo, woo, woo…
"Samantha?"
The weaklings look
away.
“Samantha.”
“Yes.”
“Are you
prepared?”
Why put me through this?
What is the point? Is there time to count to a trillion or calculate the path of
a snail?
“Samantha!”
No
hiding now.
"Samantha, will you please
spell cat?"
And so begins, first
grade.
About the author
About the Author: Judy lives in the Lake Tahoe area of
Nevada. She’s a student of creative writing and she writes every day, all day,
because she’s retired.
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