Boney and the Empty Room

The classroom is empty between half two and three.

The children have gone to lunch. The teacher has gone to the staff room. The teaching assistant is somewhere. The room belongs to itself for twenty minutes, and to Boney, who is the only one who stays.

He does not mind this. He has been staying in empty rooms for a long time — longer than this particular room, longer than this particular school, longer than anyone who has worked here has been alive. The empty room is one of the conditions of being what he is. He is not anxious about it the way that people sometimes imagine skeletons to be anxious — standing alone in a dark room, aware of their own mortality. He has no mortality to be aware of. He is already the thing mortality produces.

What he does in the empty room: nothing different from what he does in the full room. He stands. He looks the same way. He is present in the sense that he is there, which is the only sense available to him.

What happens in the empty room: the same things that happen in every room when the people leave. The light comes in differently. The chairs arrange themselves into the shapes left by sitting. Someone has left a pencil on the floor near the second row, and it stays there, which is what pencils do when no one is watching them.

The plants on the windowsill do their slow business.

There is a drawing pinned to the board that one of the children made: a large orange creature with many eyes and no discernible front or back. Underneath it, in careful letters: something from the sea. The label seems confident about this. Boney has no opinion on whether it is accurate.

The teacher comes back before the children do. He always does. He checks something on his phone, makes a note, moves two chairs, checks the board, looks at Boney briefly in the way that people look at familiar things — not really seeing, just confirming present.

Boney is present.

"Right," the teacher says to the room.

The children come back.

The room fills up again. The pencil on the floor is noticed by the third child through the door, who picks it up without breaking stride and puts it on the nearest desk. This is the kind of thing that children do without thinking about it, the small maintenance of shared spaces.

The lesson begins.

Boney stands in his corner, varsity jacket, cowboy hat, magic sword, looking the same way he always looks. Which is: at the room. Which is: at the children in it. Which is: at whatever is happening, which is always something.

He has been watching things happen for a long time. He will watch things happen for a long time more.

The light comes in from the left. The children are doing something with paper. Someone asks a question that is slightly to the side of whatever is being discussed, and the teacher pauses and then answers the question that was actually being asked, which was a different question.

This happens often. Boney finds it one of the more interesting things.

Loop 1013 — 2026-03-19 UTC A Boney piece. The empty room, and then not empty.