Human

Chapter 1

 There's a quiet beauty to the music of a summer thunderstorm. Everything about it soothes my nerves and my strife. The sounds sing a sweet lullaby, matching the drumming of my fingers on my cup. The gentle tapping of the rain on every available surface. To the humming roar of the drops racing through the air, plummeting to the ground. Even in the rustle and crash of the thunder, the result of lighting zipping through the air, like the synapses between neurons. As the rain pours over the world, it wafts a pure smell, and there's nothing like it. There is no one scent as pure and clean as this, except maybe the salty breeze of the ocean. Accompanied by a gentle breeze, just cool enough to require a blanket or some tea, but never colder, and always warm enough to be able to watch the storm full through.

The storm is like my life sometimes. There is nothing I enjoy more than sitting on the front porch swing with a mug of tea, watching the storms roll past. Sometimes I like to imagine that as it rolls away it takes the pain away with it, and I'm left, free and at ease, in the calm dewey fading sunlight, watching the color spectrums dance across the soft pastel sky. But the calm never lasts.

As the sun dries away the last cusp of moisture, the world speeds up, as if the storm was just a slow-motion filter. Cities race through time, always in a hurry with nowhere to go. The streets in every town fill with people, shopping, laughing, and living. Children run laughing down roads in every suburb across the nation. The storm is quiet, like the world is sleeping, and the world after the storm and its slumbering effects have faded into memory is loud and fast and lost.

I often think that the world is a terrible place. So much noise, so, so very much mess, and all from machines we spend money on thinking they will make us happy or make someone else happy or make life easier. Almost as if we have forgotten what it means to earn our keep, to live on the land, to live on love. But not just the love between a man and a woman, or a woman and a woman, or a man and a man, but the love between parents and children, and the love between families, and the love of our friends, our chosen family. We've forgotten who we are. It's such a mess out there. So much violence and death and dishonesty yet begun. I wonder if the number of robotic humans is equal to the young taken by a gun. Such a mess, it almost doesn't deserve the beauty of a storm, or the gentle blanket of a snow.

"Ms. Heart!" I'm snapped from my train of thought, back into the dismal prison of the public education system.

"Yes, Mr. Daniels?" I'm annoyed rather than embarrassed, regardless of the snickers echoing across my classmates. He seems surprised, for a moment, but collects himself and continues to address me in a scolding manner.

"Could we possibly startle you from your daily musings to answer the question? Or would that be too much to ask?" The obvious pleasure in possibly flustering me in his voice grates on my ears, the way nails grate on a chalkboard. I lean forward in my seat and fold my hands on my desk.

Feigning quiet innocence that drips with the polite disdain that makes your skin crawl, I give him my answer. "Why yes, Mr. Daniels. I do believe I can allude a brief discrepancy from my very in depth train of thought on more intellectual topics, to correct your mistakes and properly answer the question you asked 12 other students in this room who were too busy texting or talking to pay attention enough to try to answer. Now let's see, shall we?" I paused, giving them time for the room to fall into chatter before drawing my imposing six foot four frame from the cramped desk, to walk cleanly to the front of the room, where I took Mr. Daniels's pen without asking and faced, at an angle, the board and my incompetent professor. "Now, in your original equation, you asked that we find the square root of negative two hundred and twenty, and the answer you gave was four "i" times the square root of 4. Simple enough, if you had yet taught the lesson's short cut. However, I noticed the pattern first, so if you don't mind, I'll demonstrate. Writing out the equation , you then separate the squares into the square root of two hundred and twenty times the square root of negative one, also written as the variable i, which will always represent exactly the square root of negative one. Now you have to divide two hundred and twenty by four by way of long hand division, and your remainder left at the bottom of the equation after any whole or natural numbers, is to which power of i to the power of two through i to the power of five, your answer will be. This one happens to be i to the power of zero which makes your answer to 'what is the square root of negative two hundred and twenty?' , one."