From b0f1279553560e218b000e4b8934d50c03b61438 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Madison Scott-Clary Date: Sun, 1 Jan 2023 13:45:16 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] update from sparkleup --- diary/2023-01-01.html | 61 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 61 insertions(+) diff --git a/diary/2023-01-01.html b/diary/2023-01-01.html index 7b793bd25..a60aa26dc 100644 --- a/diary/2023-01-01.html +++ b/diary/2023-01-01.html @@ -69,6 +69,67 @@ +

Near-Future Sci-fi

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Bells had long ago fallen by the wayside. First, there were electronic beeps, then perhaps a simulated chime, or a buzz on everyone’s phone. All these I’d only ever heard about from parents, friends of my dad and mom kvetching about memories, saying little facts out loud so that they could all nod knowingly to each other or perhaps shake their heads and click their tongues in disdain.

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Me, all I’d ever known was Fr. Blaine calling us to prayer: a brief murmur of the name of this prayer or that, a little factoid of his own about which we would all nod knowingly or shake our heads and click our tongues in disdain in the hallways on the way to the next class. Sure, we weren’t supposed to—God, the pastor, the teacher, the father, the mother, the kids, right?—but there’s always a little bit of leeway built into any system, and those above were always willing to overlook a little transgression here and there. Except God, I’ve been promised, mom gently chiding me for something that probably warranted a much larger punishment, I don’t remember what.

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But, even after I tucked my tablet under my arm, after I shook my head and clicked my tongue with classmates at Fr. Blaine yet again choosing Aquinas’s prayer for students—“does he always have to be so on-the-nose?”—after I wound my way through the whine and hum of so many busses running on so many aging batteries, even then I tried to picture what a bell to end class would feel like. No quiet murmur into the silence, no hint of speaker saturation to go with a synthesized chime or rude beep, no buzz of phone, but a raucous clamor of hammer against hollow bell. Could such a noise possibly bring relief? I’d heard them in vids, of course, watched over at grandma’s on her dim and yellowed flatscreen. How could so loud a sound bring anything other than anxiety?

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Maybe it’s me, I thought for the hundred thousandth time. Maybe it’s my situation. A piercing yell of a red-painted bell yet another sign to go home to yet more yelling. Skirting around arguments and maybe-fights. Walking quietly past angry sweeping and dreading the whisper of dad’s cart, the click of the magnetic plug against its side.

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“You’re too stuck up in your head,” mom chided for the hundred thousandth time. “Take off your shoes or, Lord preserve me, I’ll tell your father.”