The overhead fluorescent lights buzz into the silence, and one can feel their brightness permeating down into the stillness of the room as the students finish the in-class writing assignment. Someone drops a pen, breaking the concentration of several of the students around him. Papers shuffle, and the cool, plastic chairs are shifting against the clean, white tile floor under the weight of those who sit on them, on their spindly, stainless steel legs.
The second hand makes it's way meticulously, mechanically, around the face of the clock, looming before the classroom like a beacon of presistence and urgency. Time's almost up. If one looks closely, one can almost hear each tick...tick...tick...as though it were being impounded into one's very mind, in their brain, in their ears, though of course, in reality, there is no sound at all. Still the clock grows bigger, magnified times a hundred, so large to a prson in that last row that it could in fact occupy th entire capacity of the room and grow, reaching back further and further, until it was just touching the tip of the nose of that person. But that would be letting one's imagination run wild with the wind.
The wind outside. The wind. The windows. The windows to the right that run all the length of that far wall, a faded peach color, and smooth like a peach, too, though not fuzzy, thankfully. Through the spotless sheen of glass, behind the window frames, lies the world outside the classroom, outside the building. There are trees and people, birds, and the wind. Gleaming through the paned and shuttered windows, rays of sunlight poke their way into the gloom and mechanical air of the classroom, like a long lost, but not so easily forgotten friend. They dance their way across the floor and the desks, through an dpast the students. They reach, reach, reach their never-ending light into the room with an air of promise. They promise joy and freedom and fancy. They stretch all the way to the door.
The big wooden door looms over the room like a guardian of time. No one enters, and no one leaves but by specific leave. It is both the captor and the savior. Through this door is the way to freedom, to outside, to sun, to wind.
Harvey C. Jackson IV, for instance, argued that he had a constitutional right to carry a gun while selling drugs in a dangerous neighborhood in East St. Louis, Ill. The federal appeals court in Chicago was unimpressed.