What is a cafetorium?
A cafetorium is a combination of a cafeteria and an auditorium. When we’re not eating in there, we’re having talent shows or school assemblies or dances.
Why isn’t there an auditorium and a cafeteria?
It would be against the spirit of Neil Armstrong and the astronauts who landed on the moon. They had to improvise in the impossible odds of landing on the moon, so we must survive the impossible odds of this shared space. This is what at least the president of the PTSA said when asked in 1983.
What’s the most important thing that’s happened?
This depends on the year and who still remembers what happens. In 2017, Yvonne Kron, then a 6th grader, asked out Trevor Quint, a very popular 8th grader during their lunch block. This was unusual because girls, especially 6th graders, didn’t generally ask out boys. Trevor let her down gently but we all wondered about her after that, and not in a good way.
How’s the food?
If you’ve got the money to buy the food they bring in outside of school, do that. Otherwise, prepare to be disappointed or sick after eating the lunch the school makes.
Do we always have to eat in the cafetorium when it’s lunchtime?
Yes, you do. It’s the only way they (the assigned teachers and the assistant principal) can watch us and make sure we’re behaving, like we’re animals. We catch some of them looking at us like we’re gross but they forget that they were as gross as us, eating shitty food and doing shitty things. They forget the snarl of their bodies.
J. BRADLEY is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominated writer whose work has appeared in numerous literary journals including decomP, Hobart, and Prairie Schooner. He was the Interviews Editor of PANK, the Flash Fiction Editor of NAP, and the Web Editor of Monkeybicycle. He is the author of the poetry collection Dodging Traffic (Ampersand Books, 2009), the novella Bodies Made of Smoke (HOUSEFIRE, 2012), the graphic poetry collection The Bones of Us (YesYes Books, 2014), illustrated by Adam Scott Mazer, the prose poem chapbook It Is A Wild Swing Of A Knife (Choose the Sword Press, 2015), the flash fiction chapbook No More Stories About The Moon (Lucky Bastard Press, 2016), the novel The Adventures of Jesus Christ, Boy Detective (Pelekinesis, 2016) and the Yelp review prose poem collection Pick How You Will Revise A Memory (Robocup Press, 2016). His flash fiction chapbook, Neil, won Five Quarterly‘s 2015 e-chapbook contest for fiction. His story, “Kyle”, was selected for Wigleaf‘s top 50 (very) short fictions for 2016. He is the curator of the Central Florida reading series There Will Be Words. He received his MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University.
