April 14, 2015

The only light on the third-floor hallway came from the daylight shining in through the windows. I approached a classroom door near a stairwell and my professor was standing there, waiting. I told him that I wished to sit-in for his Russian language class to see how it was before I registered it for the next year. He expressed with disappointment how the students needed to talk more in class and that they “should know better” as they were higher level students.

–

I picked out a small pink notepad from my backpack and it was filled with a bunch of ridiculous and sappy scribblings that I had written over the months. I told myself that I would be getting rid of it soon - preferably permanently. It was around 3 in the morning and I greatly desired to sleep but my roommate was sitting on my bed looking at his phone. He went in and out of my room continuously and so I started looking at my own phone. There was an advertisement for some kind of financial insurance aimed towards religious demographics. There was constantly music being played at a low volume in the background.

–

I was walking along a volcanic beach while being extremely tired. I nearly tripped a couple of times over some jagged rocks and for some reason I was also incredibly bored. I walked to a tiled incline and when I looked over the peak, there seemed to be people playing mahjong in the distant rooms below. I told myself that those were probably “illegal” and weren’t activities sanctioned by the owners of the beach.

–

My brother, his wife, and I were about to head out and I was packing up my bag. I found a set of car keys in one of the compartments of my backpack and whenever I touched the trigger to the box, the doorbell would ring at an unbearable volume. I didn’t make this connection at first so it took a couple of loud bursts of the bell before I realized and told my sister-in-law what was happening.

My brother opened the door nonetheless and there was a large nondescript brown box in the doorway. “Oh hey! It’s my new computer!” he exclaimed. He carried the box inside as I asked if it was to replace his old desktop. “No, it’s because my laptop is fucked” he replied. At this point he set his old laptop onto the desk and pressed the power button. It only took a few seconds before the laptop started to smoke and have sparks fly out of the side. “It is literally on fire…” I muttered. No one seemed to be responding to this at which I clarified “your computer is literally on fire”.

The news of what was happening only slowly settled in as the blaze grew larger by the second and the tower of his desktop caught on fire as well. “Seems like it’s time to feed the spiders” my brother said as a swarm of different spiders came rushing out of a hole in the box - supposedly alarmed at the sudden change in temperature. The stream of spiders wouldn’t stop as I rushed out of the room to find something to douse the fire. “Do you need an extinguisher?” I shouted from a neighboring room as I kept opening empty closets. At this point I could hear that my brother had already found one and as I walked back in he was putting out the fire with a small fire extinguisher.