OSVALDO LEON LEARNS STRENGTH IN NUMBERS BY REMINISCING ABOUT THE TIME HE WAS A DRONE IN HIS GRAMMAR SCHOOL'S LIBRARY SWAP

Osvaldo Leon was pudgy; he wore husky jeans. Somewhere, too, he must have had husky genes because his father was pudgy too. His father hadn't always been pudgy; there were black and white photos of Osvaldo's father in Cordoba, during his mandatory enlistment in which he looked as fit as a soldier in boot camp (not at the beginning of course but after the actual program).

In those photos, Osvaldo knows his future was written.He would always be a suckier version of his dad, and a glutton, a fatboy. The only thing he could compare himself to were those photos, the knowledge that he is somehow deficient, irresolute, and a bootleg gorde of what his father had been after adolescence. Osvaldo thought of his paunch, something he thought of quite a bit, and shoved his hands into the pockets of his potato sack hooded poncho with Patchouli drier insert sheet, and twiddled with the wrapper of several yelling-blue Jolly Ranchers. If he kept this up he was going to contract Diabetes, but sweets were oxygen tablets, crunchy manna, that he could grind down with his incisors and keep, completely sucked of air, tucked into his lower lip like a pellet of candy, like a pouch of chewing tobacco, a pod of aggregate, sweet powder bulb.

But as we redirect Osvaldo, and engage him to remember the way in which the administration at his grammar school made every child in his elementary school carry a book over at a time, making it in a way a Guiness recapitulation, one for the records books: the largest migration of books from one point to another. Or Maybe it could the largest forced migration of a elementary school library's from one library to another library. I mean library's rearrange their shelves and stacks all the time, but you never think of how that is actually done. Well, if you are a school media librarian and the school you work for gets enough scratch to build a new school grounds, then how do you suppose all the books from one library get to the new library? The administration coordinates a massive exodus of materials. I mean if you think of it in terms of correspondence, one book equals one child. And since the library really only had close to 2,000 volumes then what that really meant was that every child in school that day would have to carry at least three books from one library to the new library. If every child in school on a particular day would just carry three books over then that would be that: all the books from the old library would be magically transposed onto the shelves of the new library.

Therefore, there must be a picture somewheres of Osvaldo Leon in coveralls and a tiny baseball hat (and sunscreen nose)carrying books from one library to another at Winston Park Elementary. Lately, Osvaldo hasn't really thought too much about that day in his life, but he does believe that it has had a mystical quotient on his life as a batallion geek in the elite corpse of dorks that Osvaldo coordinates. Coordinates is maybe the wrong word; he Fagens them, that is mentally tortures and repudiates publicly with grotesque humiliaton their sense of well-being.