Episode LXXVI-Glass on the soles of our boots.

It was five minutes to midnight on a Wednesday night. We were hungry. The black holes of our stomachs were growling. For some strange reason, most restaurants were closed. We were too lazy to drive anywhere off-campus. We had just spent the last twenty or so minutes discussing food while we watched our seventh consecutive Bond movie in a row instead of studying for finals. As the Aston-Martin swerved around the confines of the screen, I stood up and announced to the conclave of sloth present that I was heading to the food court to get what food I could before it closed in five minutes.

I had half thought that one or maybe two people would offer to accompany me to get trans-saturated, super-saturated, and mega-saturated fats. Instead, blank, cathode ray lit zombie faces ignored my towering presence. Finally, Party, tired of me obstructing his view of the TV slowly crawled to his feet.

“I’ll come along.” He muttered. “But I’m not happy about it, and I’m not going outside.”

Sluggishly, he began to get dressed, pulling on his coat, hat, mittens, and shoes. I shifted and squirmed as vital minutes passed. Eventually, he had his shoes tied, and looked up to find me at the open door with one foot in the empty hallway. It was thirty-odd steps to the battered staircase. It was two hops, and one cartilage crunching jump to the bottom of the stairs.

After all of that, we were at the tunnel. The tunnel wasn’t even a tunnel. It was a glass cage that connected our dorm to its neighbor. It was the only one of its kind on campus. It was a strange piece of architecture. You couldn’t use it to escape a fire, because there were no doors, except those leading from the buildings. It wasn’t really a cold winter route, because it was three sides of un-insulated glass. However, it was the shortest route to food.

As our footsteps clumped along its concrete floors, I again griped about its structural necessity. The hot carbon dioxide I exhaled provided excellent punctuation to my points, but I wanted to make my point definitively. I shoved my foot at a lower pane of glass to make it clunk in agreement with my argument. My motion didn’t even have the energy of a half-hearted kick. Glass poured onto the floor in a cascade of broken stars. A frantic alarm accompanied the faint tinkling of ruptured glass.

Mesmerized, we paused to listen to the klaxon before scrambling across the now crunchy floor to the next door. Once we were through the airlock, and into the next dorm, we had to catch our breath to cackle maniacally at the explosive-decompression type siren in the corridor. Somehow, we managed to get it together to browse for cereal, chips, and Sweet Cream’s Mountain Dew with standard innocent poker-faces. We braved the cold on the way back, so we wouldn’t be possibly sucked out of the broken tunnel into another dimension, and so we wouldn’t actually be caught by the delayed response of the campus authorities.