The adventures available inside the tapered styrofoam cylinder quickly exhausted themselves. The distant droning of the class resolved down to uninteresting background hum, punctuated by random shuffling of no great interest. The fish floated for a while, working its gills and fins, presenting what it imagined would be a pretty (if alarming) spectacle, should the owner of the tea decide to retrieve it and view the scene from above. But this carefully composed tableau remained unregarded and of only passing significance, even to the creature who made itself the material of potential art. Attention remained determinedly elsewhere, and a desire for diversion began to glow, then blaze, then silently, colorlessly, motionlessly explode. The fish was bored.

Plus the tea just wasn't a great place to be. Better than the goopy apple juice, it nevertheless stung the gills with its vague acids and tannins, even gills hardened by life among the boat sterns of the sound, with all their emanations and effluents. Life within the white, stubbled walls rapidly became about nothing more than what might be happening elsewhere.

So the sound of the heavy steps and the bucket smacking down on the floor carried an interest not normally associated with such mundane events. "Somebody spill something?" a stage-whisper asked nearby, overriding and pausing the distant drone of the lecture. "They said somebody spilled something." Murmurs from a number of directions merged to form a cloud of excuse over the tea cup, as sotto voce explanations from several students collided in mid-air in a spectacularly failed group attempt to avoid disrupting the professor's talk. The didact stood in muted awe some distance away, silently struggling to cope with the role reversal inherent in being made part of the audience in his own carefully scripted play.

"Sorry, professor," the janitor offered. "I go on break in 5 minutes and somebody said there was a clean-up needed down here, so I was gonna take care of it quick." The professor continued gaping, as Daniel offered the explanation of his mishap, feebly displaying the mostly empty cup. Available sanitation expertise quickly concluded that not much could be done, or needed to be, as the unfortunate young man's belongings had absorbed most of the potential damage. Too bad for him, but a lucky stroke for a worker eager for a cup of something in the breakroom.

The bail scraped the side of the bucket as it was grabbed and lifted in preparation for hefting the gallon or so of grungy water left from mopping floors in two men's and two women's bathrooms along the corridor outside. The fish screwed up its body and then instantly straightened in an arcing shower of tea that went unnoticed in the hubbub, as the professor discovered a deep core of offended authority and began to bluster. All eyes turned to the front, some surrounded with laugh lines, some shrouded in apprehension, and one pair (the janitor's) rolling in a gesture of burdened familiarity with academic hubris.

The pail swung in an arc as the cleaner turned to leave, and the fish flipped in its own arc toward the bucket. Perhaps if the class had been about physics or even geometry rather than Elizabethan poetry, the mutual trajectories would have resolved themselves in a better result. As it was, the sad animal scraped all the scales on its right side as it impacted the edge of the bucket and slid along outside, dropping gracelessly into a rapidly departing trouser cuff.