found drama

Wandering around an institutional looking building.  It’s a school; feels like an elementry school but the students are all too grown up looking.  Not high school, more like adults.  Between classes is snack time; the halls are lined with buffet style tables.  Everything from egg salad sandwiches to sticky chocolate sweets.  I’ve been trying to be good and stick to the good stuff but I sneak in this soft, sticky chocolate mass and dive into it, the mess getting all over my fingers.

I wander through the building this way and meet up with my brother and mom on their way to the library.  Its impressively stocked and goes up for several floors.  It is not well-organized though and I have a hard time finding anything purposefully.  Ultimately I settle on a sci-fi novel that looks to be part of Arthur C. Clarke’s Monolith cycle but is by a different author.  I also find a series of anonymous letters (the first one reading like an advice column question and asking what to do when her husband asks her to “go rogue on him”).

The alarm sounds and we rush out.  I run into a co-worker who urges me to run up a tree as part of the evacuation exercise.  He calls it a “New Orleans fire drill”, and it’s complicated by the books (now tucked under my arm) and the chocolate sweet.  I do manage to get up the tree.

Almost as soon as I’m up the tree though, I jump down.  I get the feeling that they’re after me (is it the letters?) and I take off for the post office.  Inside the post office I start tearing down FBI Wanted posters and pricing guides.  I toss pens and envelopes.  I trash it.  And then I run out into the street, through a courtyard, up an escalator.  But halfway up the escalator I know something is wrong and I need to get back down.  There’s no down escalator so I try and run back down the way I came up but the ascending stairs just speed up with each step downward.

About Rob Friesel