Sueño.
On the first day of school, Jark wandered the brightly lit hallways absentmindedly, going from one class to another in a school where the ceilings stretched kilometers above his head with large windowpanes as walls, giving him the dizzying notion that he was a stuck in a large greenhouse of education where ideas bounced endlessly from one end of this frightening building to the other without any escape. He, unlike the others who marched forward and seemingly uncomprehending the extraordinary architecture of this singular school, stared upward as he walked from class to class to class at the great sky, but especially at night when he, somehow, could see the stars and the rain.
At the beginning of the end of school, Jark navigated his way down the strange corridors, loud with the usual commotion of people walking and talking and stopping and kissing, still looking up. Thunderclouds had moved overhead and let their burden of rain and water down upon the ceiling of the magnificent greenhouse. It was dark outside save for the brief glimpse of lightning that illuminated the trees and owls outside with such great ferocity, the owls that swept ever closer to the glass dome. He eventually found the exit doors that stood at end of the school where the high ceilings that met in a triangle and formed two mountain-like slopes rose even higher, as sort of a climax to a great story.
The doors led to an interlude, a thin strip of room that buffered between the great outside and the great inside, a room that was cooler or warmer than the inside depending on the weather outside. Here was the room that collected the must in which the winds were blowing. On each side of the room was a great ledge, as if constructed for some gigantic tabby cat to perch and groom in the sunlight of better days. However, on each side, parallel to each of the long walls, was a toilet. Each toilet faced each other so that as you crossed from the inside to the outside, you would see a toilet, double take, turn around, and then see a different toilet. And then the rain would hit your face in a sloppy, surprise embrace.
Jark wiped the rain from his eyes and shuffled toward the buses and, finding himself late, began to run. He and Arvis, a brash and loud kid, arrived at the steps of Bus L451 at the same time. The bus, large like the school, was built like an airplane. It too was made of glass from the chairs upward and, in the darkness, you could spy upon the people sitting in the bus, tightly packed and bored and lifeless under the flickering fluorescent light. But they could not see you. As Jark raced to beat Arvis, a small and fragile kid tripped on the enormous bus steps that led up the equivalent of three flights of stairs. Jark, arriving first, reached to help the child who had begun to whimper softly and bravely at the same time, if it is possible and I hope it is. Arvis rushed past him to take the second-to-last seat and Jark, resigned to his fate, climbed off the stairs to wait under the Carpool Awning at a great section beside the road, far from both the Bus Lot and the main school building.
He saw the girl there, beautiful and young and small, standing there in the wind. She too waited for her car to arrive as her long hair billowed in the wind, whipping the books she carried. Jark saw her, and only a stretch of wet pavement and wet rain separated them. He began to run.