Chapter 5: The Writhe of Young Jacob
Jacob sat in the full glow of the buzzing overhead fluorescents, a drowning swimmer in a sea of polyester uniforms and graphite smudged papers. Mrs. Trundt was talking, or at least her mouth was moving in such a way that language ought to have come out. Jacob could hear her voice, sure, but it was a sound detached from sense, vowels slipping off his ears like grease down glass. He blinked rapidly, trying to refocus, to wrest meaning from the droning waveform of her instruction.
“… the commutative property states that…”
The chalk tap-tap-scraped on the board. Numbers. Symbols. The skeletal frame of reason laid out in powder.
Jacob clenched his hands into fists beneath the desk. He could feel it again—the thing shifting beneath the bones of the world, unspooling threads of syntax like a fraying sweater. He turned to Tommy next to him, nudged his arm. “Did you get what she just said?”
Tommy turned, his mouth parted in an approximation of a grin, but his lips did not move. Instead, Jacob heard a response somewhere in his skull. Not a whisper. Not telepathy. Just… awareness.
“doesn’tmatternothingmatterswhathowwhywhatiswhatiswhat”
Jacob jerked away. Tommy’s lips stayed still, his face the perfect waxen mimic of normalcy. But something inside him had unraveled—no, was in the process of unraveling—his eyes no longer reflecting the light but consuming it.
Across the room, Jenny raised her hand. “Mrs. Trundt, I think…” But her voice split mid-sentence, not into silence but into colors. A spill of prismatic goo dripped from her mouth, pooling onto the desk, eating into the laminate with a hiss. Her words, once rigid and obedient, had given up on being words altogether.
Jacob gasped. He looked around, but nobody else reacted. The classroom continued in its slow, yawning, aching motion toward the bell, oblivious to the decomposition of meaning. Only Jacob seemed to notice the decomposition of what noticing even meant.
The walls pulsed. The blackboard flickered between instructions and accusations.
Jacob’s fingers twitched in his lap. His own voice, when he dared to whisper, was different now. Fragile. Malformed. He coughed and out came a paragraph—not a cough, but a fully articulated thought, an ink blot in the air that hung there, waiting to be read.
Mrs. Trundt turned to him, her face cracking down the center like an old mask. “Jacob?”
Her voice was no longer a voice. It was an abstraction of reprimand. The concept of discipline without the framework of language to contain it.
Jacob stood up. The world shook. The desks elongated, stretched like pulled taffy, sloping into non-Euclidean shapes. His classmates had no faces anymore. Only gaping, sucking voids where mouths should have been, from which spilled garbled half-words, broken syntax, meaning stripped down to its marrow.
The bell rang. Or rather, the concept of the bell rang, without sound.
Jacob bolted. His sneakers slapped the tile, his breath tearing out in desperate gasps. The hallway stretched longer than it should. His name echoed around him, but not in voices—in equations, in the decayed leftovers of forgotten conversations, in the guttural screams of phonemes unmoored from logic.
His hands grasped the handle of the exit door. It dissolved beneath his fingers.
And then there was only the great, yawning, unknowable beyond.