The Discovery

His world is constant interruption.

There are only random pieces of conversations,

ideas, understanding.

His energy pulls him away from the task,

taking him to fast moving cars and knights in battle.

It hurts to know now how much he struggles.

The end of the playful all-accepting childhood nears.

In the classroom,

robbed of steering his own thought,

a woman tries to reach him.

She fights the neurons traveling various paths in his brain,

Working tirelessly

weaving the curriculum into powerful images

that might take a ride on his speedy, sporadic highway

hidden behind those chocolate brown eyes.

One connection after another builds a series in his neural net.

She creates a lesson with the intent to teach them how to wonder

in a world that hands them all image after image,

stripping them from the intellectual tools we call

an imagination.

She hopes.

A mysterious box appears on a table

in the back of the classroom.

The children begin to ask questions.

The artifacts in the box have peeked his interest.

He wonders.

What is in that box?

Clues are slowly revealed by the woman.

The knights disappear.

An image of an old fashioned ink pen

surfaces among the other images flooding into his visual web.

He has just enough time to get the shape of it down in a drawing

as the other students guess the contents of the box,

looking onto each other's papers,

feeling like someone near to them must know the answer

they don't.

He jumps from his seat

unable to control his excitement.

He must share his discovery with her.

The woman bends down

eager to hear his idea.

On the paper he has drawn an old pen and a jar.

Chills travel up her arms

flush through her chest

down her legs and

she smiles.

He knows.

His focus is entirely centered on the box.

He sits like stone,

waiting for her to unlatch the top and reveal its contents.

Her arm disappears into the deep space,

lifting yet another box, long, with black smudges.

She delivers it into the center of his table.

Eyes big, he waits.

The children are released, hungry for the treat

they have all had to wait for while everyone else got served.

As he slides of the top of the box, a cloth stained with black ink

meets his chocolate brown eyes.

The long black sticks are stacked on top

of one another with pointy metal tips blackened from ink.

He knows.

He has guessed.

He has wondered

and he has won.

Or so he thinks.

But what he doesn't know is that

she

has won, too.