Cul-de-sac

She sits in her small black truck in an affluent suburban cul-de-sac. The road is somewhat narrow leading in, but at the end, where the road dead-ends in a row of shrubs, the asphalt opens wide, creating a circle where any car can turn around fluidly.
There are two spots of shade on either side of the street. Her car is parked beneath one, next to an old yellow fire hydrant and a five foot tall row of shrubs. In the other swatch of shade, an occupied mail delivery truck sits with the motor turned off, the mail-person is just barely visible below the reflection of autumn leaves on the windshield.
There are three large houses that face the cul-de-sac. They are many feet away from the street, shielded from the asphalt by long driveways and ivy and bushes. There are mature trees and shrubs that separate the houses from each other, with ample space between them for fencing and foliage.
Parallel to the cul-de-sac, just forty feet away from the houses and the nearly deserted street is a fairly busy road. Sitting on the cul-de-sac, she can hear a busy street not too far away.
She can hear the sounds of the school on the opposite side of the busy street. Children are playing, calling to each other on the large carefully tended field. Little boys scream with pleasure as a goal is made. There is a repetitive sound of green balls hitting the floor of a tennis court.
Cars pass regularly on the street behind the houses and cul-de-sac. Occasionally a truck with its powerful diesel engine winds its way through the neighborhood and passes the school.
Her car adds to the music, something is ticking mechanically, though the engine is turned off. In the trimmed bushes beside her car, hiding in the thick bed of fallen leaves, a small animal scavenges for food, crumpling leaves as it walks and scuffles the underbrush.
A gentle breeze passes through the two open windows of her truck. It is soft, sending a cool touch over her skin and rattling the long pieces of hair that hang on either side of her face. She sits in the car, her eyes closed, listening to the chorus of sounds that fill the cul-de-sac with vibration.

Cafeteria

The carpet is cut pile Berber of a hue that calls to mind the rough and dark skins of old growth trees in a shady wood, cacao brown with deep black cracks. Despite its already short fibers, it lays close to the ground. The wear and fray of its tiny olefin hairs is noticeable only to the ant that has found its way from the lush green jungles of the wide world to this synthetic prairie. He tipety claws gingerly upon his six dainty legs, stepping from one cut loop to the next, mandibles at the ready, antennae twitching eagerly as they guide him in his quest. Towering high above him is the flat black acrylic coated bottom of a folding picnic bench. The tops of the table and attached benches are covered with a faux wood veneer. Lined up from one end of the cavernous assembly hall, where a stage hides behind a velveteen goldenrod curtain, to the other where the Berber gives way to the textured laminate of the cafeteria kitchen, the picnic benches wait patiently like headless prehistoric beasts. Children sit upon the benches like birds perched upon the backs of rhinos, swinging their legs while digging into their brown paper bags to retrieve foil wrapped ding dongs.
Just beyond the edge of the Berber forest, twelve feet into the speckled laminate plains, a wall separates the kitchen from the auditorium. A rectangular window with a 20 foot perimeter reveals the faces of stainless steel appliances and the bodies of two plump women wearing paper hair nets, white cotton coats, and aprons. Moving hurriedly about, the women resemble nurses in their sterile bleached uniforms. Their skin in ruddy, their movements swift and mechanical. One removes industrial sized cookie sheets smothered in tatter tots from the opened mouth of the gargantuan oven while the other places poly-carbon trays on the sill of the serving window. The trays have 4 uniquely sized compartments and come in either the subdued aqua hue of toothpaste or in a pastel yellow. One compartment features the meat patty on a bun, another houses the crispy golden tatter tots, a third is home to a one fourth cup serving of slippery fruit cocktail, and yet a fourth compartment awaits the one quart carton of chocolate milk that rests with the less desirable cartons of white milk in a free standing refrigerated corral. This apparatus, near the border that parts cafeteria from assembly room, stands open like a cooler laced with sparkling frost.
A pair of tinted glass doors propped open with little rubber wedge shaped stoppers allows a steady stream of children to flow into the building where they lift a tray from the sill and troop to the cooler and select the chocolate milk before joining the brown baggers. Another matching pair of doors set in the same wall positioned at the opposite end of the building to allow access to the auditorium, stands shut. Outside the rain slaps the asphalt mercilessly, turning it an oily black color. It drums on abandoned aluminum picnic benches. Helpless to defend themselves against the eager droplets of water, the ribbed benches remain still as always, completely resigned to the unjust punishment being bestowed upon them by the pure force of nature. Hugging the wall of the building, the children stand in a long line under the awning. They talk loudly, laugh and jump in place. They pull their arms inside their sweaters to warm their hands and occasionally dart out into the rain to wash their rubber boots in a particularly irresistible puddle before funneling through the open doors into the warmth of the auditorium.

Endless School

The hallways extend in all directions, connected by stairways and ramps. Each hallway is lined with doors that lead to classrooms. There is a constant noise that swarms through the place, bouncing off the walls, seeping through little holes, taking sharp turns around corners. The walls are of different colors, some white, some blue, some bright red. The stairways are all metallic silver. No area is the same as another. The colors and turns intersect in unpredictable ways and form new structures in every direction. Most of the doors are closed, each with a number and a bulletin board to the right, most of them empty. There is a sense of a crowd but no sign of it, loose words and laughter flash through the noise here and there but nobody can be seen walking through the halls, up the stairways or into the rooms.
The building complex sits on top of a large grassy hill and continues inside of it. The structure extends under the earth and pokes out from gaps here and there, along the slopes of grass and between little patches of tall ancient trees. A wide concrete stairway cuts the hill in two and leads to a center plaza, a round space covered in concrete with a tall single sculpture at its center. The sculpture is a very abstract representation of a man with arms extended upwards. It towers over the plaza impressively, at least 30 feet tall. At its base there is a large bronze metal plaque that says "above" in a vast number of languages and alphabets. From afar the surface of the sculpture seems to be light gray, up close, it has a slightly green color.
The large central stairway leads to a secondary building complex at the bottom. Its first level is lined with glass doors, all of them closed and dark. Its second level is twice the height of the first one and it is made of a single large window that acts as a huge mirror, reflecting the buildings above it. There are further stairways on either side that continue moving downward. Inside the main building there is large lobby, with couches and tables. There are newspapers still open and scribbled post it notes scattered over the tables. Wooden doors to the south lead to a small movie theater. The main screen is blank but the projector is on, spilling pure light onto the white surface. There is a book open on the podium and a stack of papers on a small table to the right.
To the left of the screen, there is a small doorway. It leads to a dark staircase going downward. It ends in an even darker hallway, where the walls are painted black and the only light comes from small lights that are over 50 feet apart from each other. Beside each light is a door, unmarked and locked. The hallways extends back into the depths of the hill. As it reaches deeper, the air becomes more oppressive and the walls are covered in moisture. The sound of the crowd above is deafening, almost making the ceiling shake, and it is contrasted with tiny drops of water that echo with a bright crystalline clarity.
At the very bottom of the hill, the hallway opens up into a circular room. There are three other long hallways extending away from this room. In the very center, there is small pool. Above the pool, the ceiling is open and it extends upwards as a smooth concrete cylinder. In the center of the pool, there is a small concrete pedestal and on top of it, a golden chalice full of blood. On its side there is a large bronze metal plaque that says "below" in a vast number of languages and alphabets. The noise that extends through the whole underground seems to be loudest in this place, resonating through the cement cylinder that extends up towards the plaza and the tall sculpture above.