He took the time to stare at the bookcase across the room from him. It was partly filled with the fanciful fare of his childhood and partly filled with whatever his parents liked to read, but in the dim morning light it looked like a face. He squinted, lying in bed, surprised he hadn't ever seen this before, trying to make out details through clouded vision.
He blinked. The clouds went away, and so did the illusion. It was now clearly just the contrast between a few darker books against a background of light ones. He could still make a faint outline of what had once been a convincing illusion, though, and the bookcase would never look quite the same way again. Such was art.
Randall took a look at the alarm clock. He knew that it was useless to try to get 10 more minutes of sleep, so he shut the alarm off, rolled out of bed, and got ready for the day at school.
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The streets on the way to school, as usual, were alive with activity. It wasn't drizzling out today, so of course Randall had earbuds firmly ensconced in his ears, trying to draw connections between the music to which he listened and the sights around town. The scraping sounds of public transportation occasionally filtered in through the magnets; he took advice from one of his favorite songwriters and pretended it was whales keeping their voices down. It lent the beauty of nature to what was otherwise harsh, cold, and industrial.His unhurried stride carried him through a series of puddles. The collected rainwater splashed up, briefly staining the hem of his jeans. He continued walking, mostly paying attention to reaching his intended destination, but briefly glancing over at a poster on the brick wall next to him. The poster was waterproofed – smart thing to do around here – and a multitude of raindrops had collected on its surface. From where he was looking, it was almost like the paper was dripping liquid paper.
Randall suddenly got an idea. What if solid things were liquid? Yeah, like if everything that was solid was really just a liquid with a hard textured casing on top of it? Whenever they put down pavement, or asphalt, or even the paint on top of the asphalt, only the top layer would ever really dry. You could cut into the sidewalk, reach in, and get a handful of what was like wet sand on a Galveston beach. And stuff that didn't used to be liquid? Well it was now. You couldn't even write on paper, because if you dug in with your pencil, it'd bleed white out and cover it all up. You couldn't put tinsel anywhere, because it might start dripping mercury if you treated it too rough. The cars on the street with shiny paint jobs? That'd be, oh, prolly like metallic silly putty or something. And at school? You could dive into the whiteboard and spin around in mayonnaise-like goop to your heart's content.
Man, I gotta write all this down when I get to class.
((Randall Cimora continued at school... some other time, right now continued in Life is like a broken record))