Jr. High

The library is empty and I’m spinning a metal rack of young adult books around. There’s one about a boy who wakes up with a third arm. I open it and page through looking for the point where he grows the extra arm.
There’s a clock on the wall and I look up at it and realize I only have three minutes to get to the cafeteria.
If you get caught in the halls between classes, you get in trouble.
I put the book down and move towards the door and grab the handle, but it won’t open. Something is on the other side pulling it closed.
I yell at the person on the other side, but the door doesn’t let loose. I let go and try the door again and it opens and outside is the school security guard dressed as Robocop.
“You’re late for lunch.”
“You were holding the door.”
“I was holding nothing. Nothing at all.”
He puts his arm around me and walks me out a window.
Then I just, you know, just kinda fall. Extra arms begin growing out of my body as I plunge down the side of a tower and into the ground in Dubai.
I wake up and examine the world back then. When I got into the library and when I fell into Dubai. There’s nine new arms growing out of my torso and I can type on nine different computers, nine different stories. Each one has a different flavor to what I was doing in the library. In one it’s not a book about third arms at all. It’s a book about bees. In another I’m laying on the floor of the library reading emails that are posted on the ceiling.
All of these stories happened at the same time.
I’m in a large building as I type. The sun is coming in through a window and I have to squint.
*“I am in a library. The lights are all out. There’s a woman in glasses staring at me from behind a desk. I lift my hand and wave and she doesn’t wave back. I pick up a book from a metal spindle rack and begin leafing through ‘Eskimos of the North’ and every page is a different picture of me in the library. One where I’m waving at the woman, one where I’m reading the Boy with the Third Arm, one where I’m lying on the floor…”*
I stop typing and notice the light is coming from an approaching object. I stand and look out the window and it appears to be a comet or asteroid. The horizon behind it is on fire and I look down and notice that the city below me is also on fire.
I hope the tower I’m in stands.
The object stops in mid air and slowly moves towards the window.
The room lights on fire and I sit down on the floor and try to breathe in the fumes before I catch fire.
I feel the tower tilt and fall beneath me. I look around and I’m facing the glowing mass as I sit in mid air.
It beeps at me like a Fax machine.
I look behind me and ask “Are you talking to me?”
It beeps again.
A sound from underneath it and a very large number of human bodies drop and fall to the ground.
“Are you talking to me?”
It turns and speeds off in the opposite direction, but a rope made of light leaps from it and twists around my ankle taking me with it.
The librarian asks me what I’m reading. I look down at the book and it’s a snapshot of the aircraft dropping bodies on Dubai.
“Are you talking to me?”
“Yes. What are you reading?”
“I’m reading a story.”
“May I see it?”
I hand her the book and she looks down at the picture in disbelief and then up at me. Then she looks down at the picture and starts walking backwards towards her desk.
She gets on the phone and quietly gives instructions to someone on the other end.
I spin the metal rack and pick out a new book called The Librarian is Calling the Police.
The door opens and the guard isn’t in the hallway now. It’s empty.
The floor is littered with candy wrappers and soda pop cans. BDP is being piped in through the school speakers and it's that song The Blueprint. I kick some popcorn and move towards a drinking fountain.
It’s marked Out of Order. I try it and it works.
I walk down the hall.
A door opens and police run passed me and down the hall. They run through me. Dogs and all.
I look behind me and they open a door and as they pass through it their uniforms turn into the Desert Storm uniforms from 91 and I see burning oil towers in the distance.
I hang a left and two girls are fighting in the hallway.
They yell obscenities at one another and then the one with brown hair grabs the other’s black hair and runs her head into a locker.
Blood.
The brown haired girl is trying to understand what she just did when a large cavity opens in the hallways and the girls go dropping into the Earth, followed by candy wrappers, lockers, Coke cans, and I think a PE teacher.
“What are you reading?”
I look down at the book.
“I think it’s a math book.”
“May I see?”
She takes the book and says “I remember this.”
She hands it back and I look at it and I can’t read the language. It doesn’t seem like any language I’ve ever seen.
“What is about?” I ask her.
“Oh, it’s about that time…” She spins her finger in the air as if she’s dancing.
“What time?”
“That time we rocked around the clock.”
“Bandstand?”
She nods and smiles. She’s tearing up. The janitor is tearing large swaths of the library apart with his hands and there’s nothing but abyss behind it all.
I look up and a woman is staring at me from behind a desk. Another desk.
I tell her the door won’t open.
“You can’t leave here until 2.20.”
“But I’m 35?”
“3.20. Keep it up.”
I look around the room and I’m the only person alive. The rest of the seats are occupied by dead kids.
Light comes in through the window a tail grabs me by the leg and we go shooting off into the moon.