1 Task
Today, Anna’s project was due. She stood in front of Mr. Smith's desk in his classroom at school. He sat behind it, with his eyelids drooping and his back slumped. Extensive ornamentations and strange trinkets cluttered among other trophies of study adorning tattered shelves along the walls around them. The door was closed and no one else was in the classroom yet.
“Anna, I know your father’s role in our school’s funding. But the project is still due today.”
“Am I just supposed to take a zero on it, then?”
“You could have rescheduled the tour. Maybe even delegated it to someone else?”
“Can’t I have one more day on my project?”
“I really don’t appreciate your father undermining the authority of my class like this,” grimaced Mr. Smith. “Classes will continue as normal.”
“I didn’t mean for it to get scheduled like this and it’s too late to change it. What do you want me to do about it? I’m going to fail!”
A bell rang to inform students classes were about to begin.
“Are you telling me you didn’t arrange this, Anna? You’ve been playing catch-up for weeks. None of the other students are asking for extensions.”
“Just one day, Mr. Smith.”
Another student opened the door and meandered in, trailed by a few more. They took their assigned seats before extracting the various materials necessary from their backpacks for their own projects.
“No, I’m not giving you an extension on the project. You can’t keep making excuses and expect to pass my class. If there are further concerns, you can take it up with your father.”
Anna let out a frustrated breath. I don’t even want to give her the stupid tour of the stupid school. “But you know it’s part of my requirements!”
“So do you,” Mr. Smith answered. He waited for Anna to reply before prompting, “See you in class tomorrow, Anna.”
With some extra effort of self-control, Anna turned from Mr. Smith’s desk without rolling her eyes and bit her lip as she walked through the doorway of the classroom. She began to make her way passed other students spaced sparse throughout the hallway to the main office. A few lockers slammed to accompany some chatter before most of the hallway was left empty and the bell rang to begin class. All the rectangular-windowed doors closed and remained unlocked with a timed mechanism as a regular class procedure.
I guess I have to give her the tour if I want to be able to work with my dad at the lab right out of school. It’s the only way my dad will sign off on it, anyway. But I have to graduate, too. So why does this just seem like another project?
Anna watched the polished linoleum floor while she walked, following the repeated motion of shadows between the glare from light to light. Iterations of her shadow fell behind their overhead sources and faded while she kept moving. The office entered her view as she looked up to see the student she was supposed to meet already waiting in the office. The student turned, reacting to Anna’s footsteps echoing off the hard floor.
“Anna!” shouted the student from the office.
Someone hushed from somewhere in the office out of Anna’s sight and she allowed herself a smirk at the rebuke.
“Sorry,” replied the student in an eager whisper with a quick turn toward the source of the hush.
Anna recovered a straight face as quick as she could once the student turned back and their eyes met, giving no reply until she reached the inside of the office. “Hello, River,” she spoke in a quiet tone with the most genuine smile she could muster. She picked up a pen from a mug with more pens near a sheet of paper on a nearby counter, signing it to indicate her business being outside of class. No one else in the office looked up from their work, already at an understanding with the schedule for today. “Ready for your first day?”
“You know it!” announced River.
Giving a natural smile, Anna escorted River out of the office before anyone else could hush. Anna picked a direction and started walking.
“How have you been?” asked River, following at Anna’s side.
“I’m alright, I was supposed to present a project today, right now. I guess you technically got me out of it.”
“You’re welcome?” River offered.
Anna sighed. “Yeah, thanks. I kind of wanted to just get this over with.”
“Oh, sorry. If you could show me where the—”
“Hey, no. I meant, the project. I just wanted to submit the project and get that over with. I’m sorry,” Anna apologized, facing River. “I’m glad to see you, and I can’t wait to give you a full tour.”
River searched Anna’s expression, giving a short laugh to punctuate a transition of awkward silence. “So, where to first?”
“Um,” Anna looked around less distracted to observe the place they had arrived, finding a generic hallway of classrooms. “One moment.”
With a few steps, Anna moved to peek through one of the closed rectangular-windowed doors to see inside a classroom. Numerous pieces of student-produced art decorated the walls. She spotted one with a depiction of the sun shining bright over a colorful stained-glass mosaic forming a princess sleeping upon a veiled bed.
That princess gets to sleep through the day. Why can’t I? Anna took a deep breath, lingering her attention on the painting. I’m happy to do today. That’s what mom would say.
The classroom looked familiar and Anna returned to River. “This is the art section. If you’re taking anything from Drawing 101 to Virtual Reality Museum Curation, it will be in this hallway.”
“I don’t think I have any art classes, but thanks. Do you even remember meeting me?”
Anna stopped. “I’d show you the friendship bracelet you gave me if I could.”
“Oh,” responded River, letting go of a frown. “Don’t be sorry… but why can’t you show it to me?”
“I had to leave a lot of things at home,” explained Anna. And chose to leave it there, because I’m not a kid anymore and this is my last week here.
“Thanks for remembering it, at least,” commented River.
“You’re welcome,” answered Anna with a smile. “Hey, let me show you the library here. Maybe you’ll love it as much as I do.”
“Okay,” River accepted, backtracking with Anna a few sections of several classrooms each before continuing through more hallways. “This school seems bigger than it looked on my way in.”
“It seems that way at first, but everyone is clustered near the classes they’re scheduled for, from what I’ve seen. Most teachers schedule time for their students in the library a few times a month, and you can always go there before or after school. You get used to it.”
“Do you like going to this school?”
“Does anyone like their school?”
“Well, that depends—”
“The library is just up here, right ahead,” interrupted Anna.
“’On the student’, I was going to say,” finished River.
“Oh. True,” stated Anna.
“Well, do you like your classes, at least?”
“I’m pretty sure we discussed that.”
“I’m pretty sure we did not.”
“We did. I said, ‘I love the library’,” repeated Anna as if it were a sufficient explanation while she opened a polished, wooden door to a set of glass double-doors before the library for River.
Anna and River stepped inside and opened the subsequent double-doors as the first door shut behind them, entering the library. Numerous floors of shelves stocked with books and a quiet shy of anechoic greeted them as the double-doors shut behind them without a sound.
“The Lunar Library,” Anna whispered.
River’s eyes were wide with awe. “Wow!” attempted to shout River. The exclamation escaped her as if muted by a wall, audible to Anna as a faint whisper.
“Yeah, it’s best just to whisper in here. They did something weird with the room, so louder sounds don’t really travel. Older versions were a bit much for some students, but this one hasn’t driven anyone insane yet.”
“Are you joking?” whispered River.
“Am I?” asked Anna.
River returned her attention to observing things throughout the library. A spiral staircase occupied each of the four corners in the main room, offering passage to the other seven floors. After the ground floor, each floor met the three walls opposite the entrance for support. Labels on the edge nearest the entrance of each floor eased initial navigation without meeting the final wall. Space between the floors and the wall allowed a view of some shelves on each level through a glass barrier, along with the occasional student searching for something at the nearest edge. A design made of wood on the unmet wall formed the depiction of a moon with the words “Lunar Library” embossed over it.
Anna waited through the mundane while River observed with wonder. Lights cast shadows between the shelves, and shadows made their usual patterns between the floors before texturing the carpet on the ground level in various rigid shades of overlapping grey squares and rectangles.
The ornate wall still held Anna’s attention as it attempted to stray in another direction from the task at hand. Something akin to a flickering from the lights snapped her faculties back to the present moment, and she looked up to see the lights lighting as normal. No one else interrupted the light. She turned away from the lights while their bright glare faded and the shadows on the floor flickered out of their normal patterns to become something darker.
“River?”
“What?”
The shadows continued to flicker.
“Do you notice anything, I don’t know, strange?”
The shadows stopped flickering.
“What do you mean?” questioned River.
“Never mind. I mean, the shadows. Did you see them?”
“Oh, yeah,” replied River. “I saw how the angles overlap to make those patterns on the ground.”
“Right?” questioned Anna. She turned away, closing her eyes while she swallowed a lump in her throat. She opened them to watch her surroundings as she turned back toward her acquaintance.
“Yeah. It looks like the architecture makes some pretty solid lines in accompaniment with the placement of the lights around here to cast the design on the ground by us. So, do we just stand at the entrance in this library, or is there more to see?”
“What do you mean?” asked Anna.
“In the library, is there more to see?”
“Oh, I thought you meant… on the tour. We do have more stops, you know. The library has some computer labs on the ground level, so you’ll probably spend a lot of time there. They were all constructed to have the sound travel normally, since teachers like to use them for classes,” Anna paused as she tried to muster a positive expression. “You can explore the rest later on your own.”
“Great,” whispered River, still looking around the library.
Anna turned to walk out of the library and continue the tour away from the shadows.
“Hey, Anna?”
“What, River?”
“Do you know that student waving to us up there from the fourth floor?”
Anna looked up, craning to see a student a few floors above them trying to get her attention. Their eyes met with recognition and the student retreated from the edge of the fourth floor. Anna looked beside herself to River and shrugged.
“I mean, I know her. But I told her I’d be busy with this today,” whispered Anna.
“Looks like she’s on her way anyway,” acknowledged River with a gesture to the stairs in an adjacent corner. Her attention lingered while she watched the student’s footsteps hit against epoxied stone stairs, spiraling down them without a sound.
“We may as well wait outside,” prompted Anna.
“Yeah, okay,” agreed River.
Anna and River made their way out of the library by passing through the set of double doors again, opening the door out to the hallway and letting each previous door close behind them. A pause followed as each searched for some words to pass the time. The door opened again without further conversation, and the student from the fourth floor joined them in the hallway.
“Tina, I told you I’d be gone during class today. I’m busy.”
“Right, I know, Anna. Is this the new kid?”
“I’m River,” spoke River. She offered her hand for a handshake, dropping it upon being ignored.
“Tina, River. River, Tina. Now you’ve met. Can I please get back to giving her the tour now? You know I need to get it done.”
“I know, I know. I wanted to make sure we were still on for the concert tonight.”
“Nothing has changed since the last time we talked, so as long as you’re still planning on driving, yeah.”
“Concert?”
“Oh, yeah. One of our favorite bands is playing tonight,” attempted Anna.
“What band?”
Without reply, Anna’s eyes moved to a distraction of a concentrated collection of normal, unmoving shadows cast by a doorknob. The shadow almost seemed to breathe as the air between herself and the object wavered back and forth until she blinked. Lingering her refreshed eyesight on the shadow, it remained still.
“The Humanoid Behemoths! Maybe you haven’t heard of them, but you should totally come check them out,” interjected Tina as River forced a smile and took a slow, deep breath to maintain some degree of social grace. “My car’s full up, though.”
River looked to see a blank expression on Anna’s face. She turned back to Tina with a half-hearted smile. “Thanks, but I don’t really listen to metal. When I’m studying, I like listening—”
“Well, that’s your loss,” remarked Tina. “But you’ll be there, right, Anna?”
Anna shut her eyes, as if blinking something away before opening them and looking to Tina. “I’ll meet you at your car after school’s over. I just need to try and catch up at some point today in the computer lab on some of the homework I’m missing throughout the day to do this tour, okay?” not that she’ll listen to me about any of that, either.
“Sounds good! I’d better get back inside before anyone notices that I’m gone. I’ll see you later!”
“They’ll notice,” said Anna.
Tina stowed back inside the library without another word.
“So, where to—”
“It’s almost time for the next class to start,” began River with unrestrained disappointment in her voice. “I’m sure I’ll be alright finding it on my own if you want to head back to your class. I’ll see you around, Anna,” she dismissed. Her steps away from Anna closed the distance to her destination.
Anna started to say something as the bell rang. It continued a high-pitched sound and River rounded a corner, leaving her alone.
Today, Anna’s project was due. She stood in front of Mr. Smith's desk in his classroom at school. He sat behind it, with his eyelids drooping and his back slumped. Extensive ornamentations and strange trinkets cluttered among other trophies of study adorning tattered shelves along the walls around them. The door was closed and no one else was in the classroom yet.
“Anna, I know your father’s role in our school’s funding. But the project is still due today.”
“Am I just supposed to take a zero on it, then?”
“You could have rescheduled the tour. Maybe even delegated it to someone else?”
“Can’t I have one more day on my project?”
“I really don’t appreciate your father undermining the authority of my class like this,” grimaced Mr. Smith. “Classes will continue as normal.”
“I didn’t mean for it to get scheduled like this and it’s too late to change it. What do you want me to do about it? I’m going to fail!”
A bell rang to inform students classes were about to begin.
“Are you telling me you didn’t arrange this, Anna? You’ve been playing catch-up for weeks. None of the other students are asking for extensions.”
“Just one day, Mr. Smith.”
Another student opened the door and meandered in, trailed by a few more. They took their assigned seats before extracting the various materials necessary from their backpacks for their own projects.
“No, I’m not giving you an extension on the project. You can’t keep making excuses and expect to pass my class. If there are further concerns, you can take it up with your father.”
Anna let out a frustrated breath. I don’t even want to give her the stupid tour of the stupid school. “But you know it’s part of my requirements!”
“So do you,” Mr. Smith answered. He waited for Anna to reply before prompting, “See you in class tomorrow, Anna.”
With some extra effort of self-control, Anna turned from Mr. Smith’s desk without rolling her eyes and bit her lip as she walked through the doorway of the classroom. She began to make her way passed other students spaced sparse throughout the hallway to the main office. A few lockers slammed to accompany some chatter before most of the hallway was left empty and the bell rang to begin class. All the rectangular-windowed doors closed and remained unlocked with a timed mechanism as a regular class procedure.
I guess I have to give her the tour if I want to be able to work with my dad at the lab right out of school. It’s the only way my dad will sign off on it, anyway. But I have to graduate, too. So why does this just seem like another project?
Anna watched the polished linoleum floor while she walked, following the repeated motion of shadows between the glare from light to light. Iterations of her shadow fell behind their overhead sources and faded while she kept moving. The office entered her view as she looked up to see the student she was supposed to meet already waiting in the office. The student turned, reacting to Anna’s footsteps echoing off the hard floor.
“Anna!” shouted the student from the office.
Someone hushed from somewhere in the office out of Anna’s sight and she allowed herself a smirk at the rebuke.
“Sorry,” replied the student in an eager whisper with a quick turn toward the source of the hush.
Anna recovered a straight face as quick as she could once the student turned back and their eyes met, giving no reply until she reached the inside of the office. “Hello, River,” she spoke in a quiet tone with the most genuine smile she could muster. She picked up a pen from a mug with more pens near a sheet of paper on a nearby counter, signing it to indicate her business being outside of class. No one else in the office looked up from their work, already at an understanding with the schedule for today. “Ready for your first day?”
“You know it!” announced River.
Giving a natural smile, Anna escorted River out of the office before anyone else could hush. Anna picked a direction and started walking.
“How have you been?” asked River, following at Anna’s side.
“I’m alright, I was supposed to present a project today, right now. I guess you technically got me out of it.”
“You’re welcome?” River offered.
Anna sighed. “Yeah, thanks. I kind of wanted to just get this over with.”
“Oh, sorry. If you could show me where the—”
“Hey, no. I meant, the project. I just wanted to submit the project and get that over with. I’m sorry,” Anna apologized, facing River. “I’m glad to see you, and I can’t wait to give you a full tour.”
River searched Anna’s expression, giving a short laugh to punctuate a transition of awkward silence. “So, where to first?”
“Um,” Anna looked around less distracted to observe the place they had arrived, finding a generic hallway of classrooms. “One moment.”
With a few steps, Anna moved to peek through one of the closed rectangular-windowed doors to see inside a classroom. Numerous pieces of student-produced art decorated the walls. She spotted one with a depiction of the sun shining bright over a colorful stained-glass mosaic forming a princess sleeping upon a veiled bed.
That princess gets to sleep through the day. Why can’t I? Anna took a deep breath, lingering her attention on the painting. I’m happy to do today. That’s what mom would say.
The classroom looked familiar and Anna returned to River. “This is the art section. If you’re taking anything from Drawing 101 to Virtual Reality Museum Curation, it will be in this hallway.”
“I don’t think I have any art classes, but thanks. Do you even remember meeting me?”
Anna stopped. “I’d show you the friendship bracelet you gave me if I could.”
“Oh,” responded River, letting go of a frown. “Don’t be sorry… but why can’t you show it to me?”
“I had to leave a lot of things at home,” explained Anna. And chose to leave it there, because I’m not a kid anymore and this is my last week here.
“Thanks for remembering it, at least,” commented River.
“You’re welcome,” answered Anna with a smile. “Hey, let me show you the library here. Maybe you’ll love it as much as I do.”
“Okay,” River accepted, backtracking with Anna a few sections of several classrooms each before continuing through more hallways. “This school seems bigger than it looked on my way in.”
“It seems that way at first, but everyone is clustered near the classes they’re scheduled for, from what I’ve seen. Most teachers schedule time for their students in the library a few times a month, and you can always go there before or after school. You get used to it.”
“Do you like going to this school?”
“Does anyone like their school?”
“Well, that depends—”
“The library is just up here, right ahead,” interrupted Anna.
“’On the student’, I was going to say,” finished River.
“Oh. True,” stated Anna.
“Well, do you like your classes, at least?”
“I’m pretty sure we discussed that.”
“I’m pretty sure we did not.”
“We did. I said, ‘I love the library’,” repeated Anna as if it were a sufficient explanation while she opened a polished, wooden door to a set of glass double-doors before the library for River.
Anna and River stepped inside and opened the subsequent double-doors as the first door shut behind them, entering the library. Numerous floors of shelves stocked with books and a quiet shy of anechoic greeted them as the double-doors shut behind them without a sound.
“The Lunar Library,” Anna whispered.
River’s eyes were wide with awe. “Wow!” attempted to shout River. The exclamation escaped her as if muted by a wall, audible to Anna as a faint whisper.
“Yeah, it’s best just to whisper in here. They did something weird with the room, so louder sounds don’t really travel. Older versions were a bit much for some students, but this one hasn’t driven anyone insane yet.”
“Are you joking?” whispered River.
“Am I?” asked Anna.
River returned her attention to observing things throughout the library. A spiral staircase occupied each of the four corners in the main room, offering passage to the other seven floors. After the ground floor, each floor met the three walls opposite the entrance for support. Labels on the edge nearest the entrance of each floor eased initial navigation without meeting the final wall. Space between the floors and the wall allowed a view of some shelves on each level through a glass barrier, along with the occasional student searching for something at the nearest edge. A design made of wood on the unmet wall formed the depiction of a moon with the words “Lunar Library” embossed over it.
Anna waited through the mundane while River observed with wonder. Lights cast shadows between the shelves, and shadows made their usual patterns between the floors before texturing the carpet on the ground level in various rigid shades of overlapping grey squares and rectangles.
The ornate wall still held Anna’s attention as it attempted to stray in another direction from the task at hand. Something akin to a flickering from the lights snapped her faculties back to the present moment, and she looked up to see the lights lighting as normal. No one else interrupted the light. She turned away from the lights while their bright glare faded and the shadows on the floor flickered out of their normal patterns to become something darker.
“River?”
“What?”
The shadows continued to flicker.
“Do you notice anything, I don’t know, strange?”
The shadows stopped flickering.
“What do you mean?” questioned River.
“Never mind. I mean, the shadows. Did you see them?”
“Oh, yeah,” replied River. “I saw how the angles overlap to make those patterns on the ground.”
“Right?” questioned Anna. She turned away, closing her eyes while she swallowed a lump in her throat. She opened them to watch her surroundings as she turned back toward her acquaintance.
“Yeah. It looks like the architecture makes some pretty solid lines in accompaniment with the placement of the lights around here to cast the design on the ground by us. So, do we just stand at the entrance in this library, or is there more to see?”
“What do you mean?” asked Anna.
“In the library, is there more to see?”
“Oh, I thought you meant… on the tour. We do have more stops, you know. The library has some computer labs on the ground level, so you’ll probably spend a lot of time there. They were all constructed to have the sound travel normally, since teachers like to use them for classes,” Anna paused as she tried to muster a positive expression. “You can explore the rest later on your own.”
“Great,” whispered River, still looking around the library.
Anna turned to walk out of the library and continue the tour away from the shadows.
“Hey, Anna?”
“What, River?”
“Do you know that student waving to us up there from the fourth floor?”
Anna looked up, craning to see a student a few floors above them trying to get her attention. Their eyes met with recognition and the student retreated from the edge of the fourth floor. Anna looked beside herself to River and shrugged.
“I mean, I know her. But I told her I’d be busy with this today,” whispered Anna.
“Looks like she’s on her way anyway,” acknowledged River with a gesture to the stairs in an adjacent corner. Her attention lingered while she watched the student’s footsteps hit against epoxied stone stairs, spiraling down them without a sound.
“We may as well wait outside,” prompted Anna.
“Yeah, okay,” agreed River.
Anna and River made their way out of the library by passing through the set of double doors again, opening the door out to the hallway and letting each previous door close behind them. A pause followed as each searched for some words to pass the time. The door opened again without further conversation, and the student from the fourth floor joined them in the hallway.
“Tina, I told you I’d be gone during class today. I’m busy.”
“Right, I know, Anna. Is this the new kid?”
“I’m River,” spoke River. She offered her hand for a handshake, dropping it upon being ignored.
“Tina, River. River, Tina. Now you’ve met. Can I please get back to giving her the tour now? You know I need to get it done.”
“I know, I know. I wanted to make sure we were still on for the concert tonight.”
“Nothing has changed since the last time we talked, so as long as you’re still planning on driving, yeah.”
“Concert?”
“Oh, yeah. One of our favorite bands is playing tonight,” attempted Anna.
“What band?”
Without reply, Anna’s eyes moved to a distraction of a concentrated collection of normal, unmoving shadows cast by a doorknob. The shadow almost seemed to breathe as the air between herself and the object wavered back and forth until she blinked. Lingering her refreshed eyesight on the shadow, it remained still.
“The Humanoid Behemoths! Maybe you haven’t heard of them, but you should totally come check them out,” interjected Tina as River forced a smile and took a slow, deep breath to maintain some degree of social grace. “My car’s full up, though.”
River looked to see a blank expression on Anna’s face. She turned back to Tina with a half-hearted smile. “Thanks, but I don’t really listen to metal. When I’m studying, I like listening—”
“Well, that’s your loss,” remarked Tina. “But you’ll be there, right, Anna?”
Anna shut her eyes, as if blinking something away before opening them and looking to Tina. “I’ll meet you at your car after school’s over. I just need to try and catch up at some point today in the computer lab on some of the homework I’m missing throughout the day to do this tour, okay?” not that she’ll listen to me about any of that, either.
“Sounds good! I’d better get back inside before anyone notices that I’m gone. I’ll see you later!”
“They’ll notice,” said Anna.
Tina stowed back inside the library without another word.
“So, where to—”
“It’s almost time for the next class to start,” began River with unrestrained disappointment in her voice. “I’m sure I’ll be alright finding it on my own if you want to head back to your class. I’ll see you around, Anna,” she dismissed. Her steps away from Anna closed the distance to her destination.
Anna started to say something as the bell rang. It continued a high-pitched sound and River rounded a corner, leaving her alone.