A Cardiac Congestion Of Numbers

• Charlie O'Neill, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2017

This particular morning, William strolled past a blushing cricket oval, glistening in the suggestion of an early autumn frost. The air was biting, sun rays penetrating hanging mists as light but not heat. The books tucked under his slender, sharp arms pointed him in the direction of another class which served to entertain rather than teach him.
“Morning all,” Will chirped cheerfully as he entered the den of the mathematics department. He received a few disgruntled chortles in return, for it was half-past seven in the morning, and people are not supposed to show or feel signs of happiness at such an hour.
He slid into a cracked plastic chair next to Francis; feminine name, but still a boy. William, if you asked him to describe Francis, would probably tell you that he looks like a spin-off of Harry Potter, albeit with shockingly orange hair. The rest of the class was either a genius or extraordinarily out of their depth. Francis asked a plethora of poorly thought out questions, several of the middle row had encountered these problems in pre-school education in rural China, and William merely spent the entirety of the lessons fighting the gnashing urge to write an ode to the beauty of numbers.
Walls of baked teal and apricot-coloured budget chairs sat, exhausted, amongst the confusion of minds. “Francis, your scribble is making a mockery of mathematics.” The balding Mr Douglas, bearing a resemblance to that of a slightly overweight leprechaun, stood like a Mayan idol head, peering at the aesthetically jumbled working out. “It’s not his mess to make a mockery of sir,” replied Will, inconspicuously facing his book with a buoyant head. “Mathematics is rather like a marble slab with a bar of gold inside. A sculptor can choose how he must cut the stone, so long as he retrieves the gold inside.”
Mr Douglas stared at him with twitching and blank eyes. Will apologised for his language.
“It is a metaphor, sir, not to be condescending. The gold is the answer. The marble is the problem. As long as we chip away at the right parts, treasure can come through any means.”
At first, Will thought that Mr Douglas’ look was merely one of contempt for his pretentious language that really wasn’t so. But as his eyeballs began to force their way out of their sockets, as the veins in Mr Douglas’ neck started to convulsively pump an abnormal amount of blood, as sweat formed in massive goblets that rolled smoothly down his forehead, William realised exactly what a myocardial infarction looked like.
The fall. The clutching at the unsteady table, twitching fingers. A discourse of outraged energy twisting tentacles of trembling passion around an unsteady heart. Will was unnecessarily calm, leaping with grace out of an upturned chair, grabbing a phone and dialling before it was even in his hand. The overenthusiastic girls of the middle row sat in a state of startled disbelief, unsolved limits and continuities fresh in shocked minds.