The cashier working the lunch line of Dewberry Elementary School was unremarkable, save for her bright blue hair. She was in her mid-fifties and thin as a toothpick. She was shaky, and rattled and addled by bottles and bottles of prescription pills. Her name was Sylvia. Blue was not her natural hair color, it had been blonde most of her life until it turned gray, undesirable in a world which cared only about being young. She tried dying it blonde to exterminate the gray, but her great-nephew thought it hilarious to switch her blonde dye with blue. It was really very funny and mostly everyone in her family had a good laugh about it, scarcely hiding laughs from the culprit. The joke wore off when Sylvia liked blue better and had been dying it blue ever since. So be it.

A fly buzzed around, inspecting Sylvia’s blue hair. The fly had no facilities for understanding hair, or the color blue, or what was amusing about a sober and serious old lady with bright blue hair working, working and working. It was not bothered by these shortcomings. The fly landed on her cheek, and she smacked at it hard, the fly darting away just in time. The only thing Sylvia achieved was a bright red mark. This elicited laughs from a few kids near the register, and from some teachers as well. Those kids smacked themselves in parody, then each other willy-nilly. An English teacher came over, a haggard old man most at home on a barstool, he broke up the commotion and order was restored. 

The fly buzzed among lunch trays, finally settling on the tip of a seemingly abandoned straw stuck in a tiny carton of milk.

What did Sylvia want? Sylvia wanted to retire, to not feel so alone and she wanted life to have some semblance of meaning. She had always expected it to come, she was still waiting and she wanted to stop taking so many pills.

The fly saw Jimmy slowly, incrementally make his way to the front of the line. Sylvia saw herself as a tough, no-nonsense role model to all those kids, even though they would have to make all the wrong choices to wear her shoes. Jimmy finally reached Sylvia, who held her hand out to receive payment, currency. Without traces of a grin, without the slightest air of mischief, Jimmy reached into his bag, pulled out a big, fat wad of grass and pressed it firmly into her outstretched hand.

The fly seemed embarrassed by all of this, so it tucked itself into the opening of the straw, with just its eyes and furry front forceps showing from the top. The fly felt very comfortable, and it was content.

The cashier took the wad of grass, stuffed it into the register and did the same for the next kid in line, again and again. She was very businesslike, very efficient and proud all at the same time.

Jimmy sat alone and ate his food. This was his tradition, he had an oversized imagination on an undersized stature and so he sat and imagined all sorts of jazzy things. He drew a picture of a green rectangle; it had a portrait of an old man on the front. Jimmy didn’t know who that old man was, but he sure didn’t stop there. He also drew a triangle with an eyeball off to one side and circled it for effect, and then drew a little stamp on the other side. He even wrote “In God We Trust” on the back.

He thought about it and to him it seemed grass was unrelated to the things it was traded for. This was worrisome, as many people didn’t have enough grass to live and there were even kids who couldn’t pay to eat at school, all while extra food was dumped every day, only in order to preserve the value of the grass. They couldn’t give stuff away, that would break the system. That would weaken the value of grass.

It’s mathematics. 

He didn’t like thinking about that and so he stopped.

Then he thought about how cool it would be to have superpowers. He crumpled up his drawing and threw it away.

A little girl returned to the lunch tray she’d abandoned in order to trade grass for a cookie. Upon returning, she picked up her little milk carton and sucked a swig through the straw. She felt a strange tickling feeling on the back of her tongue and down her throat, just as if she’d swallowed the tip to a cotton swab. She didn’t think much about it.