the lesson begins

 

She wasn't Ms Frizzle, nor her students Arnold and Dorothy Ann,

but to get past their names, we can call them as such. It was mid-May when

Arnold rushed in with arms out to here: "the biggest black hole," he practically

bragged, as if he'd designed it himself. 

                                                                        "What do you mean?" mumbled

one of the boys, none of the girls paying him heed.

                                                                                                "TON 618," Arnold said,

"forty-three times as wide as—"

                                                            "Your face?" someone jibed, and then

Dorothy Ann lent her ears, gauging when jokes go too far.

                                                                                                            “Tell us some more.”

Ms Frizzle abandoned her 8am plan, at least for a while.

                                                                                                “TON 618,” he went on, 

“is forty-three times as wide as our solar system, which means 

it could suck us up whole like the tiniest tic tac, and—”

                                                                                                “Wait. What are you talking

about?” Dorothy Ann qualmed, “a monster in space?”

                                                                                                “More like your face,”

the heckler couldn’t resist.

                                                 But Arnold was hardly deterred. “More than

a monster—a mega-machine that eats up an earth every second!”

                                                                                                                        At risk

of allowing a boy to mansplain the thing, Ms Frizzle held back as her pupils

leaned in. The physics were matters of trust, even for people her age; what science

says about forces that are light years away, well… require the maths well beyond

any grade this building will teach. Yet hers was a vaster campus of mind.

“Imagine this vacuum,” she added when Arnold had finished… and questions

were swallowed for fear of being eaten alive. “Its mouth is much wider than forty-three

bunnies of dust.”

                                    “Bunnies?” a girl who had gerbils at home raised an eye.

“Pieces of fluff,” Ms Frizzle adjusted. “And turning the hoover on, but keeping it here—

right under this desk—would it eat all the dust in the room?”

                                                                                                            Everyone wondered

aloud, and someone suggested the cleaner could work only by having exhaust;

dust would go in, but the bag would go out, eventually full. Or else the hoover 

explodes!

                        “Nobody knows,” Arnold wanted the floor again.

                                                                                                                        “No,”

Dorothy Ann quite agreed, “no one here will ever go through it, except in some

Netflixy nightmare.”

                                                While not the last word, the lesson today began to begin.

                                                                                                                        

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2022)