Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Writing Prompt Wednesdays: Test Run

Dr. Horatio's office was not the office of a typical university professor. No, as the office of the university's head of the Hypothetical Math department, it had molded to its occupant in the same way an old mattress molds to the specific curve of a person's butt. It just so happened that Hypothetical Math is a very peculiar sort of curve. Everyone in the department knew that, in Dr. Horatio's office, space-time as it was popularly conceived, dared not go in, but instead turned back around and kept walking down the hall to more hospitable territory.

For, inside of Math 253, time lines didn't always make sense. Laws of physics were broken. On one notable occasion, an undergraduate student had foolishly walked into the office, alone, in search of Dr. Horatio so he could turn in a paper. Not only did the student fail to find Dr. Horatio, he also failed to escape the office until the following semester. He walked out, dazed, clothes torn, and babbling incoherently about having gotten tangled up in a web of string theory. He had only managed to break free when the quantum spider that had woven the web got sucked into a herd of feral black hole. The student had clearly gone quite mad, as everyone knows feral black holes are strictly solitary creatures.

In the wake of this incident, the university administrators granted the undergraduate a free ride scholarship in a mental institution and gave strict orders for the installation of a mailbox for Dr. Horatio on the wall outside of his office. Dr. Horatio himself, of course, failed to notice either the incident or the mailbox, but his doppelganger assured the administration that he would take charge of checking said mailbox. This conclusion satisfied everyone involved. Well, except for the undergraduate. However, at this point, he tended to be satisfied with purple crayons and applesauce so nobody gave him much mind about the matter at all.

6 comments:

Debbie said...

Yay! I was Ali's inspiration.

Debbie said...

FYI, I love the result, too.

Ali said...

You are always my inspiration, Deb. (Don't tell Jenny)

Debbie said...

I won't.

Mine is up.

Camille said...

I thoroughly enjoyed that little snippet. It kind of reminds me of a book I read when I was younger...

Camille said...

... and that book is Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar. I had to go find it. :)