I was in our high school classroom doing a very long run on the mass-spec; data a couple of inches thick was coming out of an old fashioned dot-matrix printer. When I tried to upload it to the network they told me I had to wait because the system was temporarily down. Then there was a recess and I was walking around the school with some of my friends. I had a big cat on my shoulder. It was an exotic wild cat of some kind. Sometimes it was twice as big as a domestic cat. It had short brown fur and it felt nice and warm against my skin. It was very friendly and liked to playfully nibble on my thumb. It didn't mind being carried around. I was trying to take it back to its cage (or my car) which I thought I left in the school's zoological garden, hidden in the middle of waist-high plants with shiny dark leaves. But it wasn't there. I drove the cat home anyway. - - - - There were old houses over-run with tall grass on a small hill. An unpaved road led up to the houses from the main road below. It was supposed to be a familiar site to me, something that I saw everyday but never bothered to check out before... so I decided to check it out. The road made for an unnaturally exhausting walk. Each step took a great deal of effort. Up close the houses looked bleached and weather-beaten. There was an abandoned building behind the very last one at the end of the road. It was partly hidden by tall grass and such. Its corrugated metal walls were rusted but relatively intact. It used to be a factory. I wanted to go inside and explore but got distracted by an enormous concrete pit on the right. Its dull gray walls were streaked with water stains. As with everything else it looked sun-bleached, the colors faded. I didn't realize I was very close to the edge (because of some kind of optical illusion and the grass) and I nearly fell in. It would've been a long fall because it was at least two or three stories deep. I thought someone should at least put a Warning sign around it. There
were school kids playing hockey at the bottom.
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