Bookish Boy Story for 3rd Sunday Write

It’s that time again, the Bloomington Writers Guild’s “Third Sunday Write” sessions (see March 24, et al.) for essays, poems, even short pseudo stories, with Facebooked COVID-19 responses rarely on that day exactly. In this case, however, I think I did come in on Monday, though busy, busy, I’ve not gotten around to offering it here until Wednesday.

So it goes.

But today’s (this week’s? month’s? Sunday’s-ish?) is also an actual story, sort of, about a young scholar’s struggles with mathematics — although with an inane sort of coda added. But it fits the prompt which was, from Coordinator Shana Ritter: Choose one of these terms from the Oxford Dictionary of Physics (yes I do keep it on my desk) and run with it *delay line *hypercharge *noncommutative geometry *polar molecule *supergravity.

And so, this month’s Third Sunday Lagniappe (and don’t forget the second, short paragraph at the end):

A BOY AND HIS BOOKS

Supergravity, yes! the boy thought, taking a moment off from his homework. That must be what they had on the planet Krypton, where Superman lived before he came to Earth, where he fools people now into thinking he’s Clark Kent just by putting on a pair of glasses. He’d always thought something was fishy about that — like maybe it was Fake News, that special news the President was always on about. Or was that the previous President? He didn’t follow politics that much — the boy, that is — but his problem was he was naive about math too, coming back to his homework. English, using big words, that was something else. He got a hypercharge out of that. But with his math assignments he didn’t understand the first thing his teacher was saying. It was so bad in fact, he’d even made up his own name for the class: Noncommunicative Geometry.

(Polar Molecules, of course, are the smallest elves in Santa’s workshop. How’s that for a delayed line?)