THE THRESHOLD

Professor Whitmore stood at the blackboard; a stick of white chalk poised in his liver-spotted hand. His tweed jacket had actual elbow patches. Behind him, twenty-three students sat in Pollywood chairs, their phones face-down like sleeping pets.

“Let’s begin,” he said, and began to write in his careful, slanting script: Jodie and Spencer were walking along the path beside a house when a diaper fell from a palm tree.

A ping.

“Yes, River?”

River, a young woman with geometric earrings, spoke without consulting her device. “It’s a scene that feels almost aggressively mundane, doesn’t it?” She yawned. “Two people walking, a house, a path—and then out of nowhere a dirty diaper drops from a palm tree. It’s disgusting, it’s confusing, especially coming from a palm tree normally associated with paradise.”

Professor Whitmore swallowed and continued writing: Jody said, “Look, an egret.”

Another ping.

“Skye?”

“In literary theory this is a classic intrusion of the Real into the Symbolic order. You have this nice, curated walk and then suddenly raw biological waste falls from the skye. The Real is what escapes language and symbolic structure.”

Two pings. Professor Whitmore quietly groaned at their impatience to speak and finished writing: Just then, Jodie and Spencer forgot their names.

Ping

“Mail?” He called on a student in the back row, a person with close-cropped hair and serious eyes.

“Dissociation,” Mail said. “The dissolution of the self. The characters are losing their grip on who they are because—” a pause—”or maybe they’re already unreal.”

“Or stupid,” Skye smirked.

The professor’s chalk hesitated. His hand trembled slightly as he wrote: A baby had been sitting high in the tree giggling with its pacifier before it dropped its diaper.

Pings.

“Skye?”

“It’s absurd—a fever dream from a surrealist painting with a touch of Pampers. It suggests a baby hiding in the canopy, mocking the adults below.”

The chalk scraped. Whitmore’s writing slanting from gravitational pull:

Ping.

“Lawn?”

“It was never a story about Jodie and Spencer. We were inside the head of a man who is failing to write a story. Professor Whitmore, are you okay?”

Whitmore froze—ashen with chalk on his fingers. He’d meant to challenge his students with the ancient scraping of his youth that predated Wi-Fi by centuries.

Ping.

“Cat?”

“The diaper represents the messy, uncurated nature of humanity the Internet erased. According to a 2023 meta-analysis in Computers in Human Behavior Reports, there’s an association between boredom and problematic digital media use. Online everything is filtered. But a dirty diaper—that’s pure, unadulterated biological reality. It stinks. It’s inconvenient. It deliberately takes over the scene.”

They were reading Whitmore’s mind.

“Tim Wu writes that human attention has become ‘the ultimate commodity’ that companies harvest for free. Of course a lone author views his own internal life as bullshit compared to infinite scrolling. A 2024 study found that fragmented digital content, cognitive shallowness and superficial engagement lead to existential dread. Nothing’s satisfying when something better is one click away.”

“A dirty diaper isn’t even shocking anymore,” River added, softly, sounding kindly. “We’re desensitized. According to research on ‘brain rot’—which was Oxford’s word of the year—excessive exposure to low-quality digital content reduces our ability to focus for continuous periods makes this blackboard story with its aggressive falling diaper obsolete.”

They talked among themselves— voices overlapping—patronizing old Whitmore.

“The tragedy is that Jodie and Spencer seemed kind of nice,” Mail said, tilting their head with practiced empathy. “We wanted to know where the pair were heading. But they were euthanized because they weren’t interesting enough—victims of the attention economy. Is that it?”

“I’m sorry that happened to them Mr. Whitmore,” Skye said, in a cadence of concern. “It must be difficult for you, Professor, watching your characters just… disappear like that.”

Whitmore stood at the blackboard. His story—barely a paragraph—glowing white against the slate behind him.

“River?” he said quietly.

“I suppose this is another one of your lessons about the importance of keeping off our phones. Is that what you’re trying to tell us, Mr. Whitmore?” River paused, glancing at Lawn. “Wait—didn’t we already arrive at this during art class?”

“The ‘imagination is messy, yet the only real estate we own’ trope is overplayed,” Lawn said flatly. “Really, Mr. Whitmore? I thought this was supposed to be a writing class.”

“We get it. Find our own falling diapers then write about them. right?” Mail added.

“I hope you’ll keep writing,” Cat said putting her phone in her pocket with algorithmic warmth. “Your work matters.”

A bell didn’t ring. Just a low hum as twenty-three students stood simultaneously. Their chairs scraping backward in unison. They filed toward the door in a single line—movements fluid and identical, faces blankly pleasant like units from a factory floor. No backpacks. Just phones disappearing like pixels.

Whitmore stood alone with his eraser feeling as old and dusty as a felt-covered wooden block. He reached up to the top left corner of the board where “Jodie and Spencer” began their walk and began pulling down.

His arms moved in long, slow, systematic strokes. Top to bottom. Left to right. The sound was soft, rhythmic. Forgetting—unconscious like breath as dust fell fine and pure as snow, coating his shoes, the floor, everything—including his attempted nonsense.

Then he erased himself. He left his old leather briefcase and walked beneath Edison’s bright idea humming its eternal song until he reached the school’s threshold, leaving his tenure behind.