MATHEMATICS

 

My scalp prickled with tiny beads of anxiety. Everyone had left school but me, and Mr. Heaney, who hovered like an unwelcome shadow, rising occasionally from his desk, hands clasped behind his back, his New Balance sneakers silent in their slow, measured steps. The blackboard had been wiped clean, dark as the night sky, only a few ghostly wisps of another world showing through. I was trying and failing, trying and failing, at long division, the paper wearing through from my endless corrections. "The universe is made of numbers," I was told again and again. "You must know this, if you are to know anything." I did not doubt this, though it was a language the Creator had somehow chosen to keep from me. I labored on as the afternoon light gradually shifted, and the clock ticked out its seconds, each with a small sense of finality. I could imagine the invisible threads connecting all things, though I gave them neither name nor meaning. I could hear the voices of summer outside rising and falling, could almost make out the words that elicited their sudden laughter, though it all seemed, in those moments, to be light years away.