Writing snapshots

I

At any time between 7:11am and 2:21pm, my middle-to high school day.  The small desk with the hollow bottom and the varnish with the strength of stone far too close to me, carved into by past scribblers.  It's exceedingly quiet, enough to hear the air conditioning humming through the ceiling.  It's SSR (silent selected reading), but my forehead's on the edge of the desk and my body's bent to hide the marble composition notebook laid out on my lap.  My open book is settled in the hull of the desk just in case the teacher comes by.  I smell paper and the acrid clean smell of blue Pilot rolling ball ink.  The words on the page are all tall and awkward, yet small, and once there's more of them they are uniform.  I'm writing a dialogue between the castle stable boy and an elite fire mage about to set out on a quest.  The margins of the page are filled with little symbols of elements, like flames and leaves and thunderbolts, teardrops.  Manga-style eyeballs and a random Pikachu face.  As I come to the end of the page my handwriting gets awkward, and I triumphantly mark the page number in the top right corner and turn it.

II

Uncomfortably warm, and my arm is going numb from leaning on my side, dominating the keyboard with my right hand while my left thumb spaces.  Quantum Leap is whining low from my little TV, but the glare from the window makes the picture invisible.  My old white box computer sits on an old coffee table next to my closet, cuddled up to the bed.  The word processor's background is screen-of-death blue, and the letters are blocky and yellow.  Everything takes a while to do on this machine but the writing goes fast, but a freeware RPG is open in another tab, waiting to be summoned if someone walks through to go to the den.  My hamster died months ago, but I haven't removed the empty tank from my room yet, and the smell makes me think of hay.  Four sisters escape a pseudo-Spain for the safety of the youngest, putting their trust in a sailor who doesn't trust them.

III

I open my history textbook and marvel at the large complication of it.  It's made bulkier by the paper bag I have taped around it to keep the cover safe.  When Mr. Crosby isn't looking I put my marble composition book open on top of the current page and tilt the textbook towards me, and continue on about the siege of the temple Firadra, a long forgotten dungeon beneath the quiet town of Bracos.  As my protagonist teeters along narrow walkways cradled by lava toward the altar, my attention drifts in and out to the lecture, nodding and looking profound at the appropriate times, gathering just enough to know what's happening should he catch me unaware, and then I proceed.  The boy next to me is dipping his head into his arms.  It's only 11:43, and the flourescent bulbs along with the natural sunlight streaming in make everything overbright and skewed.  If Crosby catches him, he'll come over and slam the paddle on his desk, so I carve each word zealously, ever-ready to flip the page and start bogus notes on Henry Ford and the assembly line.  It's much more effort than it's worth, but I do it anyway.