State of Matter

by Madison LaTurner

There has been significant change in your life, recently. Not all of it was induced by you. In fact, some might say things have gone very, very wrong.

After it is all over, there is nothing left but everything. You become fixated on the way water looks when it is poured. Formless seeking form: you spend hours moving water from faucet to pitcher to cup to pitcher to cup to…

I

You are a seventh-grade math teacher. You’ve stocked up on ties with fun patterns—especially the ones with little math symbols on them—and carry a travel mug of coffee with you to work every morning. Your students call you Mr. Marsh, and they generally seem to like you. You keep conversations with your coworkers light; you direct the conversation back to them and their lives, which they are happy to talk about.

You see, there has been significant change in your life, recently. You don’t like to talk about your personal life because your personal life is uncertain. Malleable. Fluid.

But all the hard parts are over now. You feel a strange sense of relief. This is the time for your great redemption: to become the greatest seventh-grade math teacher there ever was, to be so good at what you do that you that a local paper picks up your story—a story which lands you on the Ellen show, successfully launching your career teaching basic math and science concepts on YouTube, like Bill Nye or Neil deGrasse Tyson. People are moved by your story; you become beloved by the American public. You already have the green screen and a clip-on microphone.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. You’ve hit rock bottom, and the only way to go, now, is up. Arrows need to be pulled back before they soar—and you are nothing if not yet to soar.

II

You used to be an alien. You are only here because of some kind of reverse abduction you don’t remember. You speculate that you are one of the U.S. government’s major secrets—so secret that not even you remember the events that resulted in bringing you here.

As an alien, you drove a rocket ship to work. You would say things like “0o○Ø°0ȱ☺ ○o0°○ ☺ȱØO0,” except it made sense because you all spoke like that. Your travel mug doubled as a laser blaster. Your skin was green and your head was large and round. There was no moon, but there were rings around the planet, most visible at sunset. People had names like °0O Ø0o, which also made sense. You ate strange-looking fruits, eggs of every shade of the rainbow, and lived in a round, metallic pod as big as any home. Gravity had a different pull—you were lighter. You all bounced around as if the ground were made of trampolines.

Now, you are Mr. Marsh, seventh-grade math teacher. You are terribly human and feel entirely unqualified to be so. You woke up on this planet at the age of thirty-six and were expected to be normal. In this life, in this new and unfamiliar world, you are only sure of one thing: that things are terribly different, and you are an entirely changed person.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” says Mr. Collins, the sixth-grade pre-algebra teacher.

“It’s just an analogy,” you say, and both of you go back to your respective lunches feeling significantly more awkward.

III

You have been wrongly cursed. You are, after all, just a simple seventh-grade math teacher, and it is highly unlikely something of this caliber occurred on purpose. That seems like something reserved for high-profile politicians or A-list celebrities. Unless, of course, one of the students who failed your latest exam is secretly a witch. It is also possible that you have accidentally angered or failed some ancient god. Maybe you have broken a mirror without knowing it. Whatever it is, it is beyond your understanding. You only know the effect, not the cause.

You think you have been cursed because there has been significant change in your life, recently. Some might say things have gone very wrong. Some might say you’re on a downward spiral, that you have truly let yourself go.

Things would not be so bad if it were not so far from the life you had imagined. You grade tests, attend far too many meetings, and ignore the emails of angry parents. You brew your own shitty coffee at home and take it to work with you in a travel mug you accidentally inherited from an old roommate. You spend your morning commute on the bus. Every week, you explain to the same old lady where her stop is and when she should get off. “Tenth and State,” you tell her. “Three blocks from here.” She finds you every Monday, squeezes into the seat nearest you, and shows you her granddaughter’s address on her phone.

It is not hard for you to picture this old woman as the ancient god who cursed you. It is not a far leap for you to imagine her wearing a black pointy hat and long robes like the witches in the movies from your childhood. You can’t help seeing a cauldron with glowing, green liquid in it. She is, of course, in the middle of the woods, under a full moon. All of this is for maximum efficiency.

And then—oh no!—instead of throwing her ex-husband’s photo into the mix, she has thrown in yours instead. Who knows how she got it.

She cackles her evil witch laugh. Above her, lightning strikes. “Is this Tenth and State?” she asks you in her witchy, high-pitched voice.

You feel your coffee sloshing around in your mug with the movements of the bus. The liquid takes the shape of the cup, takes form, and you carefully feel for the moment when it settles again.

IV

You are a secret agent. Your mission, should you choose to accept it (which you did): go undercover, posing as a seventh-grade math teacher. No one can know who you are. No one can know the things you’ve done. You must live your life as if nothing has happened, as if you have known nothing but the suburbs and the public school system.

It is of the utmost importance that you appear as normal as possible.

Your therapist doesn’t like this one. She doesn’t say anything, but you know the look on her face. She has a smile reserved specifically for when you say things you probably shouldn’t.

“Tell me more about that,” she says.

“It’s just an analogy,” you say.

V

You are in a simulation. You’re being observed by an intern who just spilled coffee all over their keyboard and is now trying to aggressively mop it up with a rag, hitting every key in the process.

“Ah, fuck!” the intern says, accidentally ruining your life. “Goddamn it!”

The coffee loses its shape, spreading out between the keys and across the counter.

VI

You are dreaming. It’s like the movie Inception. You are dreaming and at any moment you will wake up. Things have not actually gone so terribly wrong. Things have not changed so much, in reality. You will wake up. You’ll wake up.

VII

God remembers you from the one time your mom took you to church as a kid and is now hitting His holy smite button as many times as it takes to get you to come back. You picture it as a big red button with the word SMITE written across it in white font. He’s decided that you need to be humbled. He’s decided to give one of his hardest battles to his strongest soldier. He needs a Job 2.0. It’s your time to be made into a Sunday school lesson.

To you, God looks a lot like King Triton from The Little Mermaid. He has a long, white beard and white hair with white robes, all of which spontaneously float on their own as if blown back by a mysterious wind at all times. Like J-Lo. Or Beyonce.

God sits in front of an infinite wall of TV screens showing images from all over the world, but it’s your little screen he’s staring at, leaning forward at the edge of his office chair. He watches you donate to your local Planned Parenthood. That must have been it.

“Fuck,” He says, smashing the button with his fist two more times just for good measure. “Goddamn it.”

VIII

By day, you are—by all means—a normal, agreeable seventh-grade math teacher. But by night, you have absolutely lost your shit.

You have become mesmerized by the way liquid looks when it moves. You often eat cereal for dinner just to watch the milk pour into the bowl and settle between the marshmallows and grain bits. You drink orange juice or apple juice or cranberry juice with every meal just so you can watch it go into the cup. You make coffee every morning before work.

If you could move into someone’s basement for a year and become a hermit, that’s what you would have done. You would have let yourself collect dust. Who needs to live out their dreams? Neil deGrasse Tyson is an asshole anyway.

You take long showers. You water your lawn too often.

You spend hours moving water from faucet to pitcher to cup to pitcher to cup to…

IX

After everything, your therapist tells you to slow down. “You don’t need to figure it all out right now,” she says. “You don’t need to know how to understand how things have changed.”

“You’re probably right,” you say.

X

You’ve just crash-landed on a new planet, just like Superman. Your rocket was struck by a small asteroid; you’ve missed your destination by a couple hundred light years. Some might say things have gone very wrong.

Once you worm your way outside the metal rocket, you’re greeted by a strange green alien with a large, round head. It wears overalls and a plaid button-up shirt. It carries a pitchfork. Despite living on what is clearly a farm, the alien lives in a round, metallic pod. You can see its wife and kids huddled by the front door, watching you.

This is not a world you are familiar with. You couldn’t even name it if you wanted to. It was not in your plans to end up here, like this.

“You’ve told me this story before,” the alien says. Its voice sounds suspiciously like the voice of Mr. Collins, sixth-grade pre-algebra teacher.

“Right,” you say. Except that’s not what you say. You say: “○0♀O○∞ °ØOØ Ꝍ☼O ○♀OₒₒOØ.”

XI

You are a cartoon character who has just walked over the edge of a cliff. You’ve been walking on air for some time now, but you have made a fatal error by looking down. All you feel is the nothing underneath you.

XII

“Tenth and State,” you tell the old witch. In the middle of the woods in the middle of the night, you really can’t see much, even with the full moon above both of you and the glowing, green liquid in the cauldron. Up close, though, you can see she has a large wart on the side of her nose. Exactly like the movies.

“Who are you?” she asks.

So, it was an accident.

“I’m the person trying to keep you from getting lost,” you say. You pull out your phone and open the Maps app to show her. Again and again, you explain where she has to go until she understands, until you understand.

BIO: Madison LaTurner teaches literature at William & Mary College, but dreams of being a professional cornhole commentator. Their prose has appeared in Puerto Del Sol, Ghost Orchid Press, Rune Bear Weekly, and elsewhere. Their play "Transfer" was produced by Love Creek Productions at the American Theatre of Actors. You can find them across social media sites @maddylaturner.