From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Stories in the Empty Classroom
Inside the preschool, time dissolves. Leif sits among primary-coloured plastic chairs, bandages still over his eyes, and begins to speak. The children who inhabit this dusty place (or who are memory, or dream) gather around him. He tells them of Rico the Architect, the youngest of a line of builders who could construct functioning miniature cities inside other people's bodies—but never inside himself. The story spirals. Mylar the surgeon presses her hand to the wall of a town hall and "performs the surgery," and Rico's body becomes the breathing building: windows glow crimson, the doorway warps into a smile. Leif: “I knew every word of it before you said it.” Katita, standing at the classroom's far end, rakes her fingers across the linoleum floor in patterns like a zen garden, her expression unreadable. The audience understands: this story is not new to her. It has been told before. It will be told again. Outside, the protest drums grow louder.