Stranger Study

Sketches (3 sentences each):

1) physical description
He is average. Average height, average weight, average looks by anyone’s judgment. His hair, the common shade of medium-dark, is an average length, and his eyes are an average brown.

2) movement
In the game of billiards, one is able to gather something about a person’s character. People calculate; he doesn’t calculate. He simply rests one hand on the table and hits the cue ball with the cue (always the same force, same motion), neither precise nor overly sloppy, never an extreme expression crossing his face.

3) insert me
I am explaining to him the law of centrifugal motion and he looks at me over the top of his sandwich from which he is taking a bite and nods, sets it down, nods. I ask if he’s understood what I’ve just said and he holds up an index finger to indicate that he’s chewing. So I scan the room as I wait and by the time he’s done and my eyes return, he seems to have forgotten the question and is taking another bite.

A History of Glass

I accidentally scrubbed the fishbowl too hard with a Brillo pad (those sponges with steel wool (a tangle of metal fibers) on one side) when I was cleaning it, so that now I can’t see the fish as clearly.

I want to scrub it until it breaks down into what it is made up of, (how does sand become glass anyway?), but that process can’t be reversed, of course, so the glass just gets less and less transparent—arbitrary lines mar its once smooth surface.

I want to stick metal rods in the sand in the middle of a lightning storm and collect the newly-forged glass, and break it into shards, and break the shards into shards, and wear those shards down with a Brillo pad until it becomes sand again.