Four o'clock in the morning and the paper is going nowhere. Slams and creaks and rattling panes provoke hallucinations about dreams you had or dreams you never had or things that happened and you forgot that they ever did. The rattling becomes a knocking and the air raid siren in your head grows more and more distinct.
It is the Greek muse of bad papers begging entrance. She is an ugly crone with a cracked kazoo that comes to you when you most desire deliverance and offers you freedom for the bargain price of a soul. Maybe she'll sell you a few fractured clauses, a nonsensical "It is interesting that ... " or a numb assortment of tangential and lead-tasting sentences.
You take her offer, the sound of her horrific kazoo-playing filling your skull. The words fill up space like a miracle, like a heavenly candy that tastes really good and coats your throat and then slides into your stomach and goes nowhere and fills up nothing. You have paid the price, you sleep a hard sleep and dream about a good mark that will never come.
You bolt upright in bed, the world coming into grainy focus, your alarm clock blaring Christian Public Radio. You panic. The slimy muse has won you over again, an hour until class, you smell like whatever it was you ate before you went to bed. You rush to your computer, print out the paper that you refuse to read and hope no one saw the apparition that cackled and left seconds before dawn.
The paper is out. Somewhere in windowed Kiewit, in a plastic box, your deformed offspring waits for you to swallow your shame and drag it to class. Asked by your classmates, "How late were you up?" "How long is yours?" and the occasional "What's your topic?" you spill out garbage, left-over refuse from the muse. "Late. Good, but not polished. Topic, what topic? We had to have a topic?"
The day feels like an awakening. The paper is over, that is what matters. Out of sight, out of mind. The sun shines somewhere above dark grey clouds, at least it's not four o'clock in the morning and a Greek goddess with a name like Wartia or Buttstinkoo is visiting your room with a steaming and smelly present that transforms itself through your fingertips into a paper that says nothing, does nothing, is nothing.
Time is funny like that - the way it passes so quickly when you are doing nothing but thinking. Thinking about a splotch on your wall that looks like a penguin or someone in your govy class that looks like a splotch on your wall. Round and round we go, thinking, wandering, waiting till the second before our grade drops into a vortex that looks suspiciously like a toilet. Then we act. And with a little help from Armpitia or whatever her name is, we can stumble into tomorrow with a semblance of sanity and a big fat B.
