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blue, some occasional yellow. Across them was written, as if in ink or blood or semen, or something less basic, maybe particulate mica mud on a rockface, Office Girl, will you go to lunch with me? It seemed a normal-ish request but given they’d only just met, during his interview circuit no doubt, it also seemed very forward (also there was the fact of it being scrawled there in the firmament, though University Hero stood next to her—how did he do that???). Yes, thought Office Girl. She’d read Pride & Prejudice. She thought, A thousand times yes! She could feel the whole castle shaking. Or maybe just the whole thousand acres of this campus. Or maybe she really did, wonderment on wonderment, understand the vibrations of the earth. Was she a seismograph? Was she a god?
It’s time for your meeting with multimodal, she said aloud, and you need to go. But meet me in the coffeehouse on the corner of 8th and Walnut at noon, and I’ll buy you a coffee. With cream. We’ll see from there.
Between them flowed a current like the one that moves the ocean in its deepest crevasses, where the little fish with lights on their heads swim about, looking prehistoric, smelling like detritus. Between them flowed a current like the one that holds the moon to the earth, something gravitational, something forgiving and graceful and terrible and worthy. Holy shit, they both kept thinking. Is this happening for real? It was. (Though one of them may deny it later, for reasons of some sort of preservation.)
University Hero could hardly descend the ladder. He had been certain angels did not exist, and yet, here was one, glimmering shimmering and sparknet and clayhammock island and the catch of a treebranch filled with bursting blooms and pollen knees. Crashing through brush! A summit with yes!! Yes, he said to her, again and again. Yes. Fuck Yes. (He, too, was not accustomed to swearing. For her, he would have anything leave his mouth. He would have anything enter it. He wanted to unfold
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