Tempo

(CW for racial segregation) The lab was white, the kind of uniform white that makes everything brighter, the better to see how pristine and white everything is. Everything in that room was white. White tables, white instruments, the doors were white, the lab coats were white, the glass on the observation window was so clean that you could only see the plain white room on the other side, a room with nothing but a white box in it. The scientists were all white. Half a dozen white old men in white lab coats with white hair looking through the glass into that white room and none of them said a word.

Only one lab assistant was in that day, and he came through the door holding a little hand in his. At the end of that little hand was an arm that lead all the way up to a little girl in a black dress and red shoes. That little girl was why he was worried.

She had her mouth open when they came in. One of the scientists turned to look at her and her father for just a moment, and she closed it and looked down at her feet. But the old white man didn't look at her long. If you asked the girl then why she was afraid of the old white man's look she couldn’t have told you, and it wouldn’t have concerned her. That was how her father liked it. Knowing is hard. She had known before though, and she would know again. This was why he was worried.

The girl and her father shared a secret smile, and the girl's heart raced. She didn't know what she was going to see, and that excited her. They looked through the glass with the old men, behind them but in the same room, looking through the same glass. All of them watched the box on the other side of the glass glow white hot and flicker. That was nothing new.

They watched this box every day. On that day, though, that father took his daughter with him like she always asked him to, because she had asked him to. This was why he was worried.

But then the box exploded, and for the first time she knew again what she had come that day to see. Eleven years earlier, the girl held the box firmly in her hand and told her father exactly what it could do, and she asked him to have taken her into that lab.