two divided by one

by Enrique De Alba

The wheels on the bus go round and round. I hummed the song against the window, spinning the world into a blur of green. Up front, the bus driver had the radio on low. The radio drifted back to us, washed away by the warm breeze and the chatter of kids ready for summer break. I watched the playground slide float past us, a twisty blue tube like a bendy straw, as we pulled into school.

"Heya, Billy!" My friend Sam stood by the entrance, waving his whole arm so hard his jelly bracelets bounced up and down. His blond hair was a mess, like always. We high-fived. Our backpacks bonked against each other as we walked to our classroom.

I sank in my orange chair and put my binder that said MATH on top of the shiny desk. Mrs. Campbell walked in with her marshmallow dress swishing.

"Okay class, don't forget to turn your homework in to the homework tray." She turned to the chalkboard and drew a sharp line with a hard dot on top and bottom.

"Division," she smiled. The line sliced across the room.

***

The next day, I woke up with a big headache. It felt like a marble was stuck behind my eye, pushing against the bone. I tried to blink it away, but it was on the inside. I ran to the bathroom. My eye wasn't popping out, but my face looked funny in the mirror. Lopsided.

"Did you pack your homework?" my mom asked between the coffee machine whirring and the scrambled eggs. I looked at her eyes. They weren't deep like Mom's. They were just brown stickers, and one of them was peeling at the edge.

"Umm," I swallowed. "Where's my mom?"

***

"There's a couple things it could be. We'll need to run some tests to get a baseline." My dad was talking to the doctor. His jaw was tight, and he wouldn’t look at me.

They told me she was my mom, but she looked stretched out and huge. Her hands were puffy and red, like a bunch of sausages. And her neck looked like a fat thumb.

"Say Ahhh..." the doctor said as he placed a popsicle stick in my mouth that left the taste of cardboard.

***

When I went back to school, my classroom looked wrong. The desks weren't desks anymore. They were squares. The whole room was. I heard my friends' voices and I understood what they were saying, but they sounded like robots.

I stared at my friend's mouth as he talked to me. His mouth was a white fence of square tiles, except for one spot. There was a tooth missing. Just a blank spot my eyes kept sliding off.

Over the fence, his lips worked like a rubber machine. They squished together tight, building pressure until – POP – they burst open. The lips moved around the grid in a complicated code. Open, shut, pinch, pop. The machine was chewing on air. The popping sound stretched into a long, high whine, and the squares in his mouth burst loose. An endless grid of white.

***

I blinked, and found myself on top of a table that was buzzing. The floor was a square grid of tiles. They had put a square-shaped dress on me, so I matched the room. Small hands were attached to my arms. They looked pale, like meat sticks.

I felt like a toy being pushed into a white plastic tube. As the table pushed my head inside, hammers banged against the walls of the cold cylinder. The hands shook, the cheap glue floundered, just barely staying on, and the banging sounds surrounded me.

***

"Is the ball growing inside my brain going to make me die?" I asked the doctor.

"Not at all! Don’t you worry. The surgeon will take it out, and you’ll be fine in a jiffy," he laughed. When he leaned over me, his face was a flat oval with two black lines scratched into it. He wore a stiff trapezoid shell over his chest. Underneath, his black legs clicked fast against the floor tile. They twitched nervously as he skittered away.

***

Blackness snapped into a flat line of light.

"He's awake! – Thank God!"

"Oh, Billy!"

Something warm spread over me as I realized my eyes were already open. Lines and squares traced the perimeter. These shapes had become familiar now, their straight edges twitching at sharp angles. An eye in the wrong corner, a mouth sliding off the edge.

"How do you feel?"

"Much better."

I pulled the muscles around my lips to form a smile. I opened my mouth and kept the teeth in a straight line, top to bottom, a white rectangular grid.

Photo of Enrique De Alba

BIO: Enrique De Alba is a Stanford graduate and former Google engineer based in McKinney, Texas. He leads a machine learning team and writes fiction blending mathematics and what it means to be a fleshy (human) being.