The Storms Of August

Chapter Four: I'll Keep My Eyes Fixed On The Sun

The sounds and sights outside the biology lab made it clear someone had done something horrible in the world, because God was having a hell of a temper tantrum. Wild wind swirled heavy rain and dying leaves alike around the parking lot at tornado speed while the sound of a justice hammer crackled down upon the Earth loudly followed by it's flash of electric light. Leaves that stood up to the dropping temperatures were stripped off there branches green and bright to join the fuss and made almost as much noise as the thunder to do so. Despite it being the height of the day, the sky was the color of midnight on a moonless evening and birds were too afraid to chirp into the intense gusts. The small valley outside the window was suffering. What is usually a peaceful sea of green might as well be an actual sea. Puddles the size of three car garages and deep enough to cover your ankles in littered the mini rolling hills. The darkness on the outside only made the brightness of the florescent lights that much more noticeable, and the stinging of slow seconds on the clock that much more painful.

Mrs. Gleason spoke over the heavy rainfall beating on the rooftop above her with all the power her lungs could put forth like a child lost in a crowd, but the audience outside her window panes were heckling too loud. I was in the second row of lab tables out of five, just five yards away, and needed to fine tune my ears to hear what she was attempting to voice. The teapot, as Joe called her, bounced about like an unattended jackhammer while her hazel curls tried to keep up with her tiny feet and racing thoughts. Every so often Gleason would adjust the tiny black frames back into the right spot on the bridge of her nose as she looked at us with raised brows. Every time, short and stout shoulders would fall after coming to the conclusion we did not hear her and did not care. Then, she would turn back to squeak her dry erase marker on the white board to scribble diagrams and key words in faded green and the repetitive cycle would start again.

Next to me, the back of a fuzzy head was stuffed into an arm basket as it's attached torso would rise and fall slowly to the rhythm of aimless dreaming. Nick usually went into hibernation during this class, grunting into the black countertop of the lab table like a bear and only moving to adjust the clear goggles strapped to his head. His lab coat, when worn, was always just dangling off his broad shoulders like a grape on a vine. Today, Nick wore his black and navy blue jersey beneath the crisp white linens as part of the promotion of the homecoming game in three days. Every year, the football team has to wear their game jersey's to school in order to promote the homecoming game that everyone and their grandmother is already going to.

By the front of the room, Joe spread his stupidity like a kite on a string by vigorously rubbing his pencil on the edge of his lab table in order to shave off the uniform yellow coating of the utensil. The boy only lost concentration in his project when his hair flopped into view over his goggles, which were firmly fixed on his face. All he did to fix it was jerk his head to the side to let air and momentum do the work before continuing. Beneath Joe's basketball sneakers, the fairy dusting of shavings specked the white floor tiles and suggested he had to be on his third or fourth pencil.

I was startled by the sensation of something hitting the back of my head and innocently falling to the floor. I look by my feet to find a crumpled sheet of lined paper in the form of a loose ball waiting for me to succumb to it's temptation. Slowly, I bent over and hung onto the edge of the countertop as I pinched my fingers together to catch the corner of the paper. I propped myself back onto my stool and faced front, slowly undoing the tight crumpling of the author as to not poke the bear up front. With one more smoothing of the notebook paper, I could see the loops of her handwriting that would later fog my nights.

Hey sunshine :)

I immediately looked behind me and there she was in all her glory. Her lab coat was held on her body by two buttons, exposing her low hanging tank top. Below the safety goggles on her head she wore that smile. The smile that could cure cancer and revive those of untimely fatalities. Those gigantic brown eyes in the forest of freckles looked back at me easily and without harm like a mothers caress of her child's cheek. Without a care she had the windows of my soul on her and wide open, no matter what she was or wasn't looking for. Yet always, including this very moment on opposite ends of the same black table, she managed to keep those beauty's wide open without anyone seeing the padlock within them. Demi's butt chin sat comfortably on the seat of her palm as she gazed at me, head head tilted just slightly to the left like a curious dog. I just stared, endlessly, like her face and her completion melted into an optical illusion that I was determined to find the starting line of. My moment was short lived however, because the beauty raised a careless hand at the elbow and twiddled a 'hello' with her nimble fingers. My time was up and I turned back to face front. And no, I did not find the start. Only an artist and the art itself know where its starting line is.