Hallways

_ She walked down the hallways of her school every day. Class, to class, through hallway, up stairs, to class again; every day in and out the same. She saw the same people in the river of faces in the hallway; she saw the same faces in the river of people on the stairs. She would greet the same people, have the same brief conversations about the same life-changing drama, with every new problem but a variation on the same theme. So, one day, she stopped.

_ Standing there, as if she was but a toy and her battery had run out in the middle of the course she traveled daily, she watched. The river around her splashed with confusion as water suddenly turned to stone. An eddy of bewildered souls formed around her, before they gathered themselves and moved on their way, some shoving at the girl who stood as an object in their path, forming a clot in the broad arteries of the school. Most just diverted their path and continued, as though they had never strayed at all.

_ The warning bell rang, and the tempo quickened, an increasing crescendo in noise and rapacity of movement that climaxed as the final bell rang. Diminishing numbers of students went past her, most managing to dart aside at the last moment. Only a few were left now, sprinting by at a dead run as the tone ended and the doors began to close. One boy dashed around the corner, his momentum made it impossible to stop before he hit the girl standing in his path. In what must have been a nearly reflexive movement, he altered his course slightly and used her shoulder to vault higher and faster, his extended arm pushing their bodies apart as he sped past. As he disappeared out of sight behind a corner, the first batch of students who just didn’t care strolled around the corner, harassed by a teacher to get to class.

_ It occurred to her that soon the teacher would notice her, and come to her, and then more, clustering around her like angry hornets when their lairs were disturbed. They would ask her questions: Why are you here? Why aren’t you in class? Why won’t you speak? She would just stand there, stone, and they would stop talking to her: Who is she? Does anyone know who she is? Why won’t she do anything, say anything, explain, move, why won’t anyone tell me what’s going on? Someone get the counselor.

_ She realizes that it is too late, the course has already been changed too much. She can no longer go back to how things were before. Even now, as the aggravated teacher starts towards her, the possibility that she could just go to class and everything could be as it always is, day by day every day the same, dwindles down to nothingness. Yet still, as the esteemed and honored teacher of unwilling students draws near and begins on the path which has unknowingly been set out for him by questioning her, and everything that she had foretold was to become no longer future but the past, she remained standing. All of this was happening to someone else.

_ The first instructor called another to come help him deal with her. She stood powerless, motionless, devoid of thought or rather of any reason, any motivation to go on, to move at all. Paralyzed by the utter hopelessness and the overwhelming feeling of ‘too late’ she attempted to use the muscles still clinging to her bones, but the nerves never brought the orders to contract and they remained latent. As still more people clustered about her she struggled harder, then gave up. Now, even more so than before, it was too late. She would just stand there for eternity, locked inside her body. Her eyes stopped their frantic glances, side to side, of the faces around her and began to scan them levelly, as though committing them to memory. Perhaps she was, but more likely she had ceased to watch and was now merely looking at them.

_ She recognized the woman who patrolled the downstairs area before school started. Evidently a counselor, she bowed her back in an attempt to bring herself to eye-level and put herself in a less threatening position. She just looked at the standing girl, who’s inability to move was beginning again to terrify her. As she rested her legs upon her feet and her body upon her legs she struggled against the bonds that held her motionless, paralyzed and silent. But the more she struggled the more she knew it was too late.
_ She just wished she was not noticeable, that no one would have really cared if she never moved again. She would just stand there, and eventually people would quit shoving her and just adjust their paths to take them around her, as if she were a statue or just one more broken toy upon the floor. She would slowly turn to stone, and her color fade, and, eventually, those perceptive eyes would see less and less, and her mind would cease to work in quick blinding brilliance, becoming dulled until the spark of life in what use to be a girl dwindled into nothingness and she existed no more.
_ Then, as her body slowly turned to earth when the heart that beat inside didn’t care if it did so anymore, her bones would keep the whole structure upright, until the soil turned to dirt, then sand and powder, and her bones would clatter to the floor, and soon turn to dust themselves. And the janitors, in their never-ending fight against the grime threatening to overpower the school, would sweep up what had been a girl and now was no more than the ashes of what had been, and shake her into the wastebasket.
_ Would it burn, like acid from the pain inside her, a hole through the trash can? If so, there would be a hole burned into the floor beneath where her feet had stood motionless for the years, or was it only minuets?, since that fateful day when she had stopped.
_ Perhaps this was a disease, and soon there would be an epidemic of frozen shapes in the hallways. The river’s flow would be slowed, and in some places completely staunched. Those who remained would fall prey to the dust of those who had frozen, and in the end, the spores, the remaining crumbled bones would burn everyone, slowly seeping the latent pain into their chosen victim, who (poor unlucky soul) decided to breath in that ill-fated moment.
_ The counselor waved her hand in front of the girl, breaking the latter out of her revere. Such things were not meant to be. The school, the world, would not succumb to the same ice that had forced her to stand so still. This was her battle alone, against herself.
_ Blinking, the girl freed herself from the depths of her overactive imagination and ran to class, sliding into her seat just as the final bell rang. She knew even before any mouths opened what questions would escape the lips of those around her: What took you? Why are you late? The teacher quieted the empty words with just a seconds’ glance at the girl who had broken the routine. And that was all it was, really; she knew that she had neither the strength nor the weakness to break free from all of this sameness.