Under The Ancient Skyscraper

Being twelve. Being a girl. Being a genius. Being beautiful. Being Black.

None of those words meant what they said.

Hope James was all of them.

Down a small path, up a tall hill there's a tree... The Ancient, her mother called it. Under the early light of dawn, the stately oak looked more like a skyscraper.

"Ancient Skyscraper hardly makes any sense, Langston."

Walking beside Hope to the tree, just far enough so her backpack straps wouldn't bounce off his nose, was her 89 1/3 (not even 90) pound blood hound, Langston Love James.

Hope walked to one of the two worn out patches of grass under The Ancient, took off her backpack, removed the blue rolled up yoga mat from it, unhinged the Velcro strap, and placed it to fit perfectly over the worn out patch.

Langston spun around three times on the other patch, laid down, and watched Hope.

Hair was the first thing you noticed about Hope. Big. Bushy. Bold. Perfectly parted down the middle. Done up like two overgrown Christmas baskets with a million mahogany and gold ribbons flying out.

"Today's the day, Langston."

Exactly 24 and a half days ago disaster struck.

Like all geniuses Hope had one great goal. Hers was to prove a Grand Unified Theory to the Universe. "One Law to rule them all. Hope's G.U.T.," her brother Finn called it.

What disaster happened to get in her way?

Hope solved it.

A verifiable scientific theorem unifying all the Laws of Science.

But even with this proof, something was missing. The something making everything move.

Where did Life come from?

What made Science work?

Textbooks and AI models were of no help.

She'd exhausted and disproved most anyhow.

Plainly put: Hope ran out of Science.

Literally.

As the question dealt specifically with Creation itself, Hope did something 24 and a half days ago she never thought she would.

She turned to religion.

As Buddhism was the most practical of Faiths, and Enlightenment sounded useful, we find Hope now sitting zazen (a perfect one of course) under the oak tree (no suitable bodhi trees in Massachusetts).

It took Siddhartha 49 straight days of meditation to reach Enlightenment. With thousands of years of scientific advancements, not to mention a working Grand Unified Theory of The Universe, Hope would reach it in half the time sat zazen during the optimal hours of sunrise.

She checked the dawn, looked at Langston, gave two nods of her baskets, and smiled, "Here goes Nothing, Langston."

And with that, Hope shut her eyes.