Mark walked across the bridge over the frozen river to the campus. He was beginning college mid-year, or a semester late as his mother, who worked in a Tampax factory, would say.
He was not going to work at a Tampax factory.
His hands were in his pockets, both for warmth and effect. His clothes were black. He curled his lips and exhaled steam, imagining smoke rings flowing from those flesh pillows that had not yet graced the flesh of a non-relative female. This was no matter. He carried a paperback of The Stranger in his back jean pocket; his legacy began now.
He finds himself in a classroom. It looks suspiciously like a room in his highschool and thus took on the same warm, putrid association in his memory. But what did he expect? This was a state school. He had just expected it to be more...salon-like. This was a symposium and he was a young Plato at the feed of the Sophocles--for philosophy was his major--who should walk into the room any moment now. He glanced at the clock. He had never had a teacher who was late before. It had always been the other way around. This made him suspicious. He looked around the room at his fellow philosophers-in-training. The class was Intro to American Politics. He looked eagerly at the mouths flapping. He was in college? What were we all to discuss? Surely, the injustice of the world! The Iraq War had begun less than a year ago. We are up in arms! We refuse to be cannon fodder! We don't want to be part of this system of rapacious conquest for oil and endless war! We are young and brilliant and righteous and...
"...living in my dad's attic. Yeah, it's not so bad. Got my privacy."
This enlightening discussion between knowing baseball jerseyed boy and solemnly nodding gum chewing girls was interrupted by the abrupt arrival of the professor. He was wirey, thin, balding and wore a bad tie.
"Sorry, traffic. Now..."
Then the words came. Empty, everyday words. Syllabus this, assignment that. Textbook, textbook, textbook. Mark felt his soul float up through the top of his head and edge towards the window. It was just about to leap, when--
"Erm, sorry."
A new voice. Foreign. Eyes look.
Black hair, blue-black, the blackest he had every seen. And those eyes! Freakishly green, like emeralds encased in glass. She moved swiftly, with the gait of one who wishes to be discrete, but in her case this was impossible. He took in the sheer form of her. 6 feet tall? Or maybe it was just those heels she was wearing? God, they were sexy. Shiny black fuck-me boots laced all the way the way up to the shapely thighs, encased snugly in pink leggings, revealed beneath a black and white striped tunic that showed that, yes, she was impossibly long and intimidating, but also delicate, graceful, breakable. She was in short, his goddess. And, suddenly, he was no longer a philosopher. The universe was pointing him in the direction of mythology.
