Once upon a time, in a far away land known as junior high school I belonged at the head of the class. Every word that fell from my mouth was a golden apple, every stroke of my pen perfection. That was before the glass ceiling was installed by the board.
Although looking straight up all that was visible was the epic blue sky, I would glance edgeways and glimpse the true surroundings. A mesh of greasy metal was creeping up the walls, leaving soot across the carpet. Gears clicked and grinded their teeth, wires snapped and buzzed and the ceiling began to sink slowly.
Three grey clouds drifted across our fenstration to the sky. Depression rained from the first, death from the second and failure from the third. The patter of the rain's lonesome hands on the ceiling awoke the class from their slumber.
You could see each member lower their head from the sky and stretch. Each one stared around them in shock, taking in the horror of their new surrounds. Eyes were rubbed and arms pinched.
They lifted their shoes with little sucking noises from the slush of medieval and industrial sludge that had quietly slunk under the door. The empty space had been filled with the twisted hulks of metal animals, clinging to the chair legs and tables with their claws.
The light had faded amid the rain and we all noticed how close the ceiling had gotten to our heads.
Confusion changed to anger. Voices raised and fists began to pound upon the glass.
"I don't want to be here" "I hate this," "What did I do wrong?" "Why, why, why?" "Where are you?"
They began to scream although no one could hear them.
One boy was separate from all the rest. He was crouched beside a metal beast, so close that his nose brushed the monster's snout. He stared deep into its glowing red eyes without fear. The others weren't watching but if they had have they would have seen his watery blue eyes become infected. The rims at first grew redder like he was about to cry. Then the veins in his eyeballs turned scarlett creeping in to devour the black pit of his pupil. The beast's dried out skeleton, robotic and half-dead passed its malevolent spark onto the unwary boy, manifesting in the brilliant crimson eyes that looked at the world through a film of blood.
The others had worked themselves into a frenzy against the people that kept them there and began to yell more and more illegibly. The ceiling sunk further. The sludge rose to clasp their calves.
The boy with the red eyes began to laugh, a sound at once like a tractor and a church bell. Now it was the machines' turn to awaken. They yawned in the closing space and began to reach out their fingers to the students, one by one.
The slowest was another boy, lanky like a bean sprout, who within seconds had two demon machines with glowing eyes clutching both his legs. The lanky boy gathered all the paper he could into a bundle and whacked it against the monsters, uselessly. The others had enough time to chuck him their own paper but even that wasn't enough.
The girls were huddled on their tables banging their heads against the glass. They were sure there was sunshine out there. Some days there were clouds and some days there were none- if only they could escape this mysterious hell they'd found themselves in.
Every inch of effort was put into the glass without a single crack. Each received a pounding headache and the glass was as firm as a brick wall. They were all doomed to die where they crouched.
The metal monsters saw their advantage and grasped each child, pulling them down, down, down into the depths of literary history. Heads arced in the exquisite pain near death, gasping against the toxic sludge for any wisp of oxygen left in their air conditioned classroom.
The red eyed clock on the wall clicked to midnight.
The boy with the red eyes stood suddenly, startling all the beasts, his fist crashing through the glass ceiling, splintering shards like nails into the bodies of his afflicted classmates.
What should have then happened is thus:
The clouds cleared above their window and the red-eyed boy was lifted like a marionette from the room. Each student then began to rise, pulled from above out of the sludge. The metal hands cringed from the light, hiding in the cupboards and cornices where they belonged.
But this is really what happened:
The rain had built up upon the ceiling gushed down in a grey tumble of depression, death and failure. It stole all semblance of breath from the lips of the students and their once-struggling heads disappeared below the dusty water.
The red eyed boy who stood in the centre turned to stone with each drop of water that touched him. A single rubric floated by on the waters.
"An engaging piece..." it dissolved back into the water.
The stone boy over many months grew metal upon his limbs, but he stayed forever looking at the sky.
And me? I only belong among the sludge at the bottom of the classroom muck, a slab of rusted metal masking half my face, directing my movements into jerky, ungraceful motions. The mud of centuries has clustered around me so tightly that I can no longer see the sky that I so wanted to reach.
Is this truly our path to freedom?
