Salvador Dali Cream

On top of everything else, three student writers passed their short stories. That was Wednesday night. Over a couple of nights, I left their stories in front of the electric fan. They weren’t wet, had no need for drying. I used a broken wall clock for paperweight. I admit that the dramatic effect motivated me. Stories anchored by the clock. Easy to identify with clocks. Broken ones, particularly. Or with the period in clock lives when the batteries are dead, when everyone had care to pump new ones in but no one had the wherewithal. Whenever we get around to hoisting them up fixed, powered, and aligned with the heartbeat of the world, my identification with the clock evaporates. That could have been part of it, the whole paltry drama. Or what could have been a more vital part of it may be my desire to see the clock melt like Dali cream. Then we would gain the necessity of drying the short stories. But that didn’t happen. So come Friday when I turned the fan off and took the stories home with my red pen, I had made up another reason for exposing their stories to artificial wind for around thirty-six hours. The reason I unearthed or claycreated was that I desired to see the flipping of pages like wings in search of sky. I wanted to know how the wind went about reading.