The last brain cell finished its 3 minute argument.

Now the Head Cell flicked his eyes ‘tween the 2 sides o’ the board & said in his deep baritone,

All in favor, raise hand.

His thick-lidded eyes glided o’er all the raised hands & counted 89 out o’ 175.

The yesses have it. & with that the Head Cell slammed his fist down on the green button o’ the console.

A fleshy finger taps a button on a phone. His copy o’ Super Smash Bros. Ultimate should arrive December 12.

Sadie flopsweat like a fountain as she shook the hand o’ the inspector. Though she knew ’twas too late to make any last-minute changes, her mind couldn’t help racing o’er what slight specification out o’ millions she missed which would put the lives o’ potentially hundreds o’ millions o’ cute li’l ₧: an image a pixel off-center, a color whose hex code was a digit off, — or worse, ran into some obscure CMYK conversion by the printer that couldn’t be tested on her end — or the PDF wasn’t the right format out o’ the dozens out there, or misjudging the visual weight o’ different elements, causing 1 side to be lopsided & its foundation to be an inevitable threat to collapsing into freshman-art-project confusion within a week.

Luckily, though she missed a specification, the inspector was nice ’nough to give her ’nother chance to fix them. Though she would have to hold her breath for ’nother week, ’twas better than eternal perdition.

What she didn’t realize was that though she avoided damnation, she fell into a purgatory o’ reconstructions she would ne’er ’scape.

The final few students walked in, distracted by chat, just before the bell rang the period & sat on the last remaining toadstools round the middle hill.

Today we will go o’er what you’ve dug o’ the 3rd circle o’ Planter’s Hill by Evelyn Waugh.

While some found only the most tedious o’ artifacts, like rocks & bones, the expert students showed off in their hands encrusted in every corner with soft dirt the true jewels they uncovered, like a scrap o’ the same style o’ shirt found in Pioneer Skies Mountains, formed in the same era, which was left here — for their teacher insisted that nobody just accidentally dropped artifacts on these excavation sights, & if they did, that they dropped these artifacts & not ’nother, or didn’t have a different artifact, could still tell us much — to show us how important wardrobe aesthetics was to people in that era.

But the teacher neglected the most amazing artifact: the dirt & its powdery feel, its particularly coffee shade, its summer smell.

’Twas a job that required the utmost precision, but earned one the highest o’ salaries — far greater than vulgar physicians o’ the 3rd dimension.

Though she was sure she would kill herself with hypertension @ an early age from all the sweat that dripped from her forehead under the pressure, she also got a high from it, for the feeling o’ success when she calculated the exact second she needed & pulled off her mission. She drank up the look on the faces o’ those doubtful fools when she did the impossible: sniping from the shadows renegades trying to tamper with our perfectly crafted history, trying to introduce their own messy imperfections, as if time were a modernist canvas where things just happen without the careful symmetry o’ future & past holding each other up like the bonds o’ diamonds.

It started 1 summer-sunny October day while carrying a basket o’ work shirts to the washer. With no time to go back inside — or maybe she just didn’t want to — she just wrote the 1st word she thought o’ — a gorgeous word full o’ syrup — onto her T-shirt.

Then it crept. Words would come to her mind, & she would add them after the previous word, till she had noted down so many words that she ran out o’ room on her T-shirt & had to move on to her jeans, & then had to buy new clothes after new clothes.

Her agent was bewildered when he received Levi’s manuscript & instead received piles o’ wrinkled clothes, each full o’ intricate black squiggle patterns.

’Twas a long shot, but the Programmers must’ve wanted it to happen, for Clayton found himself now stepping up into the role o’ Sebastian, the gardener. He wouldn’t waste his luck for a second. The 1st scene he rehearsed with Jodi he looked @ her with the shadow o’ the awning o’er his forehead & said in a deep voice, .

Everyone looked @ him strangely, puzzling where he got this random line not in the script @ all — everyone but Jodi, who looked @ him with horror.

The idea popped his mind so quickly, ’twas as if the world were spinning in slow motion as it happened, deflating like a balloon.

But though his brainwaves raced to consider the consequences o’ what was happening, his muscles were imprisoned by the same slowmo to change.

& then, like a car breaking into 2nd gear, time jumped forward: the bouquet landed in his hands, & the feeling o’ its soft, flaky petals all o’er his hands jolted him so hard that he didn’t have time to squeeze in ’nother thought before he felt the sharp pierce o’ a bullet in his chest like a bee sting, & then a melty, numb nothingness.

¡The speaker box was on hot! & nobody could stop it.

Constance stood there sweating, fighting the urge to bash the drunk fucker to shut up. But that would only give her ’way further. So she stood there, trying to look cool up @ the sun while the radio squawked out its recitations o’ some o’ her & Alton Fox’s private conversations to the open clouds while that bastard Orval scribbed smugly in his pocket notebook. How Constance would like to shove it right down his throat.

But Constance kept herself calm. She brushed her nails gainst her blouse. ’Twas Orval that she should feel sorry for. What a horrible thing to happen to you — ¡to have such a shocking radio drunkenly stumble into the bathtub while he’s in it!

Everyone was so enthralled by the Goduncle’s birthday party — not the least the Gearmother. A pity the Goduncle couldn’t show himself. ¿What was biting him that he so rudely brushed off their attempts to have a quiet chat with him?

They were all watching in rapture the clown juggling so many sharp knives so quickly it was a blur — & the clown didn’t e’en seem to be looking @ them, but straight @ the audience with a calm stare that didn’t seem aware o’ what its hands were doing.

The “clown” was glad they were so rapt up that they didn’t notice his attention keep flicking gainst his better judgment toward his Godnephew creeping toward the audience with a shaking pistol in his hand.

Some ducks get all the unluck.

Ginger earned a hard lesson o’ this when the market blessed her home with its attention in the form o’ an explosive boom — so explosive that it attracted the unwanted attention o’ so many polite but shallow hanger-ons to squawk & gawk.

That boom was the force o’ the INVISIBLE HAND crushing her home into wooden shards under its immeasurable weight. Its will be done, whether we are one who thrives or suffers. Amen.