The Most Vulnerable Brains – Cory Popp

July 18, 2012

Philosophy One

            John lowers his head, raises his hand to his face, rubs his temples and laughs silently into it. He tries to wrangle the class in and as he begs them to delve deeper into the philosophical implications of the readings, they compare Plato to soup and the mind to high school locker room fights; one even compares Socrates’ plight to a Robin Williams movie. The jokes draw laughs and the soupophile punctuates it with a riff on his harmonica. John allows the chaos in the room to swell to an uncomfortable pitch, to the point where the students have worn themselves out and the room is quiet again. It’ll happen again and again, but he’ll take it, thinking that his soul must have done something awful in a past life and that he is sure he deserves it.

Eyes without a Place

           Stephen had a face only a mother could love and she left when he was six.

The Reverend

            If what Socrates said about sense distracting from pure knowledge was true, then Dan had to be the least knowledgeable of all.  His garishly abnormal features dwarfed any other aspect of him and gave one little option other than to take notice of them. His broad nose, one would comment, had to be the most gloriously satisfying resting place an eyeglass maker could find his crafted work resting upon. His hands were like the comically inflated ones of a marionette, and just as so, they danced whenever he spoke with his booming voice, which emanated out of an equally exaggerated mouth. His eyes and ears saw and heard every little detail, no matter how deficient, but without any truth or knowledge, he constantly had to refer to the crib notes he would often scribble on his oversized hands, like living, ever changing, novellas, to decipher what they all meant.