The Reviewer

   At this time of the night you see dark borders around the corners of your vision. Even under the gentle light of your desk your eyes burn and threaten to close, but you know six hours from now will be your last chance to narrowly escape the clutches of summer school. You move from the eleventh page of the textbook back to the first that you've read. The dreadfully drab brown pages are rendered as colorful as a million rainbows by the various shades of pastel and ink you've applied on the technical text, but these don't help.

   In trying to read once more, without your awareness your mind drifts away to a memory reminiscent of a scene in a Ray Bradbury book you read for school a long time ago. Under the pricking heat of the noontime sun you—your young and boundlessly dumb self—tried to grab the fine white sands of Boracay. You don't even remember why you did that, but at that moment you were so hellbent on holding that sand in your hands that not even the concerned calls and rationalizations of your mother would sway you. But the more sand you grabbed, the tighter you grasped it: the less you ended up with. And every time it slipped from your hands, it would hit the ground with a long, hissing sound. This—amplified by the quietness of the waves, the oven-like heat on your hair, and the sweat getting in your eyes—only served to frustrate you into getting even more determined in the petty endeavor of getting the sand, perpetuating the downward spiral until you exhaustedly stomped and kicked away to join your family for lunch. Upon cringing at this memory you snap back to the task at hand.

   At this second reading you focus hard enough to notice the serifs on the letters and the spaces between them. But the more words you try to grab, the tighter you try to grasp them: the less you actually end up with. Your G-Tec floats dumbstruck over the blank piece of paper.

   The beach hisses as the sand slips away from your fingers.

(358 words.)