ANITA TENSION
Special to The Lampoon
You’re leaving the Williams Center, headed for the library. You decide to take the bridge from the second story to expedite your journey. You push through two sets of heavy double doors, step outside and stop — your foot, it’s cold. And wet. And wholly submerged in four inches of the rankest, most vile black shitwater you’ve ever laid eyes, much less a whole foot, upon.
Congratulations, you’ve just met a beloved fixture of the Fredonia community: That Puddle That’s Outside the Second-Story Door to the William’s Center and Has Been Forever Probably.
The Lampoon sat down with the puddle last week to discuss its time here in Fredonia.
It was a typical cold Fredonia day, and the puddle was beginning to freeze over in places, a fact of which it seemed endearingly unaware.
“Let’s see,” it said, the wind gently bobbing one of the many, many cigarette butts floating in its oily pseudo-mud. “I think I came to Fredonia with either the first or second rain to ever fall on the steaming barren igneous rock 3.8 billion years ago during the Archean period.”
And since then, the puddle says, it’s simply spent its days accumulating water, leaves and garbage. Other puddles have come and gone, including some on the bridge, but none have endured so much or for so long.
“I actually — and I don’t let myself brag about this often — but it was actually me who fostered the formation of our earth’s first multicellular organisms in my sluggishly lapping ripples,” said the puddle with a self-deprecating plorp noise. “Of course, they all died — I’m highly, highly toxic, you see — but the first ones were all me.”
The puddle has stated that students and community members should feel free to approach it whenever they want.
“You can always find me in my spot,” it said. “I’ve been here since the earth’s formation, and goddamn it, I will be here until the end of days.”