GRIND-HOUSE
[The names, faces, voices, and events of this story have been altered to protect the innocent, as well as our agents in the field.]
The scene was a cool, plain, and monotonous tomb. Every book and chart and song was a store-bought plastic rainbow, sneezed and chewed upon by thirty-year-olds. The prescribed learning outcomes – dry and inflexible as the ass of ox – were, well, prescribed learning outcomes. A goat herder in South-Nor-Eastern Sudan authored multiple choice quizicles to precondition students for their thrice measured imperial gallon of triple-ex, that would be washed over them until their pant-wetting was made visible.
Over in Division 111, Ms Chokchile – her pocket filled to near-empty with all of the encyclopedias, galleries, and museums of the world; all data sets and computational power of the homo species, on a sleeping, voice-activated, touch-portal – chooses to misremember the last twelve wars and instead has her childrenses memorize a braille poem of “All the Four Senseses: Site, Smell, Smell, and Taste.”
Meanwhile, in another Division, Division 11 (out past the swing-sets, down the ravine, across the flooded marshy playing-fields, between the dumpsters and the vast parking lot, in a temporary[permanent] portable[imobile]) Ms Gradgrinderson prepares her Sevens for their Atwood unit. They would be critically analyzing the finest literary works of Margaret the renowned literarian. Ms Gradgrinderson sat up twelve nights and worked twelve days to compile a twelve-hundred page compilation of the renowned MA's tweets. Though, in the end, she would decide to print a compilation copy for each and every of her Sevens, she felt the tweets somehow glistened, in their natural state, on the screen. “Can you see them glisten?”, she would ask one and all the Sevens, pulling up sample tweets on her untouchable touchscreen. The Sevens would all, each and every one of them, nod in agreement. The literary analysis, Ms Gradgrinderson planned, would consist of three parts (fifteen minutes each): in the first (that would go eleven minutes over), the Sevens' would exhibit an exemplary attempt at finding a favourite tweet; in the second (that would last only four minutes), the Sevens would not retweet but recreate their favourite tweet (not with a keyboard but in pencil, and not in handwriting but by using tracing paper and carefully shading in all of the dead-space surrounding the characters on their untouchable mini touchscreens, producing a kind of lugubrious negative in the most laborious possible manner); in the third, (not a minute under or over) all Sevens would share their work with the class. Then Ms Gradgrinderson would spend her fleeting recession carefully stapling tweets to walls covered in green wax paper, bordered in a rainbow coloured border of little mini rainbow borders. Then Ms Gradgrinderson would spend unwanted lunch-hour tracing and cutting letters to form a title for her Sevens' Wonder Wall that would read “DIV ONE-ONE SEVENS' ONE-OFF FIFTEEN-MINUTE LITERARY ANALYSES”
At the very same while, in still another Division, 1, Mr Grousegrinde galvanizes Gregorian geometry onto the tiny squirming pewter pitchers poorly partitioned below, far below, him. (Did I mention how beneath him these wee creatures were? Good.)
Little Miss Dominica Facilitas Gloria, the last dry pant in the building, raises her little hand – and in synchrony her little eyes and their little widening brows follow. Grousegrinde spots the misplaced hand of the little Miss and her squirming pewter pitcherness.
“Your name again, Miss?”, asked Grousegrinde.
“Momma calls me Glowie”, stated the little one, as she stands, curtseys, and begins to blush.
“Bah! Glow-ee is no name for a pupil, a student of the world, an aspirational woman of letters!” Grousegrinde snapped back. “You must refer to yourself in the full, and insist upon it from others.” Looking down at his sheet of attendance he snapped again, “Miss Dominica Facilitas Gloria is the name! You must call yourself Miss Dominica Facilitas Gloria!”
“Momma calls me Glowie” the little one explained with a trembling voice and another curtsey.
“Well”, Grousegrinde snapped, “she has no mind and no business calling you this!” he insisted. “What is your mother, this silly name caller?”
“My momma?” asked the little one. “I don't know. I suppose she is the inventor of the wheel, the discoverer of penicillin, the first woman on the moon, slayer of serpents and dragons and all the wet monsters under your bed, I suppose” the little one chimed with a glint in her eye, an out-turned knee, and an elbow shooting from the opposite hip.
Grousegrinde leaned back, “Bold lies, Miss Gloria Dominica Facilitas. BOLD! LIES!” He then leaned forward out over the rows of squirming pitchers between them and added, slowly and quietly with growing disgust, “You must not... tell us... lies... CHILD!” Returning to his erection and volume, Grousegrinde put the little Miss further-more on the spot. He pop-quizzed her, “If your mother was born on the moon, as you state, then you will be well-versed in all things lunar, won't you be? And, if this is true, then it will be of no trouble at all for you to give us the definition and composition of the moon.”
“Oh, yes sir” spoke Miss Gloria, offering another curtsey.
“Go ahead already, Miss Gloria Dominica Facilitas. Now you're stalling, child”, sparked Grousegrinde, jabbing a knobby digit into the air.
“Um, well,” Glowie trembled “momma tells me the moon, our earth's only natural sat-o-light – and one of the largest and finest of all natural sat-o-lights in the whole of our fine sol-r-system, so far as we've come to know it – has a pair-a-gee, an app-o-gee, and ek-sen-tricity (measuring 362,600 kilo-meters, 405,400 kilo-meters, and 0.0549, respectfully). The moon, it has a sir-cum-france of 10,921 kilo-metres, at is e-quaitor. The moon, it or-bits the earth at 1.002 kilo-meters per second of speed, fast, taking 27 days, 43 minutes, and 11 and one half seconds. The moon, so far as we've come to know, as far as our thinking goes, was formed four point five billion years ago, or so—“
“Yes, yes, but what of it's definition?” Grousegrinde ground.
Startled, she regrouped, curtseyed again, and offered back, “The definition of the moon is a 'natural sat-o-light of a planet”, signalling her finish with another curtsey.
“What's that?” Grousegrinde ground again, swiftly retrieving and then slamming his OCD/OED on his desk.
Matching volume with Grousegrinde, Glowie belted “Any naturally occurring sat-o-light, or 'body', that revolves around a plan—“
“Wrong!” cannoned Grousegrinde, “it says here between the covers of the OCD/OED, Empirical Collegiate 74th Edition, that 'the Moon, often capitalized with an uppercase 'M', is the Earth's (capital 'E') natural satellite, which shines by the Sun's (capital 'S') reflected light, revolving from West (capital 'W') to East (capital 'E') in about 27 and 1/3 days, children!” He glared into his book, then shot his face up, “Now Miss Gloria Facilitas Dominica, if any of your fellow pupils are to believe you ever again, and take your sworn oath here this day that you were born on the moon, it will be because you are able to give them the precise composition of the Moon (capital 'M') – for who could be of the Moon (capital 'M') and not know its composition!” laughed Grousegrinde, exposing his gross grind.
Offering another curtsey, little Glowie stated slowly and calmly “The moon is pre-dominantly composed of... silica.”
“Is that so?”
“Well,” said Glowie, “pre-dominantly silica. Like sand, you know.”
“Liiike saaand?” Grousegrinde questioned with a most ridiculous voice.
Glowie said back, matching Grousegrinde's tone, “Mostly saaand, but alllso al-you-minum, magnesia and liiime. Yes, and oxides, oxides of iiiron and sooodium, and tiiitanium – so far as we know.”
“Bah!” barked Grousegrinde. “Says here,” stabbing his claw back into the OCD/OED (Empirical Collegiate 74th Edition) "'the Moon is composed of a distinct crust, mantle, and core'! So where was your 'DISTINCT CORE', Miss Glowie Facilitas Dominia?” he demanded, looking to the rest of the pitchers a-squirming. “I'll tell you where,” barfed Grousegrinde “no-place! No-place at all. Which is where you are clearly from, and where you are headed with this attitude – and very clearly not the Moon, as you would have your class and your fine instructor mis-believe. No, you must sit down and stop with your storytelling.”
Glowie curtseyed and retook her seatedness.
Grousegrinde slammed closed the OCD/OED (74th Ed. Col. Emp.) and returned the class to their Gregorian geometry.
Not a moment later little Miss Glowie raised her hand once again. When Grousegrinde noticed her, and her obvious attention-seeking, he stated to the class, “After all of that, what more, what more, could Queen Georgia Falicia Domestica POSSIBLY want?!”
Glowie stood, curtseyed, and recalled-admitted-requested, “To pee, please, Mr Grousegrinde. All I ever wanted was, please, to pee. Thank you.”
“Well,” said Grousegrinde, “there will be plenty of time for that during your FORTY-FIVE minute lunch – just FORTY-FIVE minutes after your FORTY-FIVE minute exam, just FORTY-FIVE minutes from now – don't you think, Miss Gloria Francesca Bolivia Begonia?”
"Yes", said Glowie, sitting back down and wet-warming her chair.
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