Wednesday, May 9, 2012

"The Mathematician's Time Turner" by R.C.

For my CW 302 class, I adapted a short-short from a novella I am working on, "The Mathematician's Time Turner". And in turn, I have created a video adaptation of that short-short, which you can watch here.
The music is by this wonderful gentleman whose website you can visit here. Below is the short-short.

The old man rips a sheet of butcher paper from the roll next to the stand, the sound of its Kraft pulp being removed hurriedly, fiber by fiber per millisecond, echoing through the spacious room. The oversized sheet follows the arching momentum of his arm as he whips it free of the roll and above his head and releases it, crinkling and snapping against the air. It floats and settles down next to his feet as he drops it on top of the disarray of angry dried, web-like paint splatters of a multitude of colors and scattered heaps of darkened and rolled up eraser residue that hid the old wooden floor.
     He reaches for that makeshift stand, created from an altered coffee table, and plucks a roll of black gaffer tape, erasure dust collecting along its exposed adhesive sides. From here, he lifts that sheet of butcher paper and plants it precariously lopsided against a random portion of the wall, right on top of other ripped layers of butcher paper, rice paper, newsprint. They are all covered with penciled or inked scrawls of cleanly formed numbers and italicized Greek and Roman letters and lines, in a cryptic form from a distant view, varying font sizes that made the room spin, some fading, some the darkest black. His dry, wrinkled forefinger and thumb peel a sliver of the black gaffer tape off its roll, the eraser dusts still sticking to its thin side. He ignores them and places the sliver on one corner of the butcher paper, flattening it to adhere it against the other paper sheets on the wall. And repeats with the other corner. He tosses the roll of gaffer tape to the floor. It clacks against the floor, brushing apart its own space amidst the erasure dust.
     From that makeshift stand, he withdraws a marked up TI-84 calculator, its cover and three numerical button caps missing, along with a no. 2 pencil; no longer smooth and glossy, a small cut embedded in its yellow wood, its dark graphite tip is still intact, its stubby pink eraser worn down to its end.
     He grasps the pencil with his left hand and places the tip against this blank grayish, butcher paper, this empty sheet waiting to be filled with his numerical thoughts and anguish. The old man punches the plastic springy buttons, rows of numbers appearing from the bottom of the gray screen. These he transfers onto the butcher paper, hurriedly recording the answers that he processes on the machine. His pencil forms and rolls and scrawls these dark consistent markings in rough lines across the sheet, cracking apart the emptiness of that sheet of butcher paper.
     He takes a deep breath, sweat running into his eyes, and glances at the work on this sheet, scanning it for mistakes be fore taking a step back to run his eyes over the entire room, rearranging some of the sheets on the wall in backwards chronology.
    The old man withdraws from the handmade stand a brown, slightly crumpled, and coffee stained notebook, the size of his aged hand. He opens it to the newest page. Her soul had updated this page of silvery lines that blossomed new equations and answers and paragraphs of analysis every eleventh day of a month. He looks at the old faded polaroid photo tucked into the back of the notebook. Two kids, a short boy and a taller girl, who oddly resembled each other with their matching brown locks of messy hair and young, fresh faces, were laughing, arms thrown over each others shoulder. The girl clutched an hourglass.

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A/N: I'll come up with something here eventually

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