Please note that the names and details have been changed to protect the silly.

Twelve kids gather around my 3D printer. Their fingers and noses are pressed against the plexiglass. From a distance, it looks like a blue fish is being conjured out of nothing. Up close, the nozzle deposits hair-thin layers of molten plastic. This is happening at about the speed of drying paint, but they’re transfixed nonetheless. When the kids ask what they can print, I say anything they want.

A few light up; the object of their desire is instantly visualized. Others let their jaws drop, too stunned by the rush of power to think clearly. And then, of course, there are the limit-testers.

“Anything?” “What about a million dollars?” “Can I make something bigger than the earth?” “No… bigger than the GALAXY?”

I say sure, why not? The class pauses, furrowing their brows and looking at me for the first time. A couple of them even believe me for a moment. But then they start to grapple with the physics of it and realize I’m just letting them think it through. I’m going to be one of those adults and this is going to be one of those classes where the teacher keeps them on their toes. They sulk briefly at the lack of resistance, but quickly recalibrate their requests.

They think I’m just doing it to keep them in check, but wish-fulfillment is a powerful thought experiment. Hypothesizing about what could go wrong takes paranoia, but imagining best-case scenarios takes vision. As a kid, I had a teacher who called it “the magic wand.” The power is yours: what would you do with it?

In the classroom, the kids create 3D designs. They all face away from me, working on standard-issue black laptops. From where I stand, I can see their dreams take form… for the most part. I spot Solitaire on one of the screens, which is instantly alt-tabbed when I approach.

Solitaire Boy is on the small side for fourth grade, and all business. I ask him how it’s going. He says fine, he’s just not sure what to make yet. There’s an obvious subtext to our conversation: he’s promising to pretend to work if I promise to look the other way. I suggest he take a break to look around at what the other kids are doing for inspiration, and then I let him be.

I help out some of the other children with the topography of their dream-things, giving Solitaire Boy a few minutes to himself. When I come back, he’s not at his chair, but leaning over the shoulder of one of the other children. There’s a small galaxy taking shape on his screen.

“What’s he making?” Solitaire Boy asks me.

“What are you making?” I ask Galaxy Boy.

He grins at us. “I dunno!”

Solitaire looks downright offended. He asks how you can make something you want without even knowing what you’re making. Galaxy just giggles. He presses a few keys and all the objects vanish.

“Look – I made everything so big you can’t see the edges anymore!”

Solitaire’s had enough. He returns to his seat and starts arranging shapes on his screen. He declares that he’s going to “at least make something that’s realistic.”

By the end of class there is a menagerie of animals, videogame characters, and abstract art. When I come to Solitaire’s screen, I see he’s built a tiny ladder. I ask him if it’s what he’d like to print, and he says yes, it’ll be useful for his pet hamster.

Solitaire listens with glee as I explain to Galaxy that he cannot, in fact, print something that’s 9.99x10⁹ centimeters tall and also invisible. But Galaxy just smirks, deletes everything he’s made so far, and calls up a plain, simple sphere. He hovers over the radius number entry and looks up at me.

“What are the maximum dimensions again?”

K. A. Hamilton is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

by Eric Beebe

This week, I’ll leave for Spain to visit my sister on her semester abroad. She took French in high school, and I took Spanish, so the months leading up to her trip were filled with half-hearted agreements to compete with each other on Duolingo for supremacy. She upheld at least her end of the bargain, but I continued a shaky track record in the study of foreign languages.

I studied Spanish in high school to look well-rounded on college apps, the same reason I tolerated three seasons of football and volunteered to direct traffic at a Republican Party cookout my grandpa helped organize. German had been my real interest, but it wasn’t offered. So I undertook Spanish with all the effort a disinterested teen pressured to look good on paper could muster, taking three years before I would’ve had to sign up for AP and actually attempt fluency. I was content with my limited use of it in things like making Xbox gamertags (xOSO FUERTEx) and masking anxieties in social interactions (because sometimes hola is just so much easier than hello).

My lack of dedication felt vindicated when the first country I traveled to out of high school was Poland. I didn’t bother to learn much Polish either before my month there. What I did learn, thanks to a handbook my uncle bought me, was how to say “kiss me” (pocałuj mnie) and “do you want a massage?” (czy zrobić ci masaż), my uses of which were limited to shouting in my host-brother’s friend’s back yard after taking twelve–plus shots at his house party, before I started puking on a tree. I did pick up the basic yes, no, excuse me, etc. and familiarized myself with their phonetics, but training myself to recognize “dz” as “j,” “j” as “y,” “y” as “i,” “i” as “ee,” and so on was far from communication. I entertained thoughts of learning Polish and practicing online with my new friends to catch up after I left, until I actually left and felt no more motivated than I had for Spanish.

The problem I saw was I had no inherent link to either language. German had interested me because of my German/Nordic lineage, but I’d heard of no Polish relatives, and the only Spaniard I knew of in our family tree was Valeriano “The Butcher” Weyler, who’d earned his moniker using concentration camps to try quelling Cuban rebels in the 1890s—not exactly the kind of relation I wanted to embody. So come sophomore year of college, I asked my parents for books on Old Norse for Christmas, and the following summer I sought out a world expert on the subject for advice on teaching myself. I spent a day and a half with my sources and copious snacks—long enough to learn novelties like how the transition from þing ("meeting") to “thing” gave the phrase “I have a… thing then” meaning and cognates like land (“land”) and bok (“book”). Then I burnt out, around the same time I must have run out of Girl-Scout Cookies, and barely touched the material again.

But that fall, I felt my first great pull to Spanish when my lit seminar spent a week covering Pablo Neruda, with special attention to faults in translations of his work. A self-proclaimed hopeless romantic, I obsessed over his Cien sonetos de amor. My professor invited someone to try reading one poem in the original Spanish, so—buzzed on pre-class whisky and thinking Spanish classes from four years back would help—I volunteered. He stopped me, rightly, after the first line to save me from further embarrassment. I hated myself for losing so much of my Spanish I couldn’t even stumble through, and I told myself then I’d relearn Spanish. But Austria got in the way.

I spent the following spring and summer priming myself on German for a semester in Vienna. Once I got there, I was proud to be counted among the advanced students in my German class—for beginners. Even so, by the end of the term I felt steamrolled by the curriculum. When first ordered, “Ich möchte ein Weihenstephaner, bitte,” at what would become my favorite bar, I felt relief when the bartender shouted back in a thick Liverpool accent, “I don’t speak fucking German! Say it in English.” Still, I pestered the locals I befriended with drunken attempts at stringing sentences together, and, by the morning of my flight home, I was thankful to have picked up enough that my Turkish taxi driver and I could find a common-ish tongue.

After college, I briefly entered a daily regimen of German, Spanish, and Polish practice back-to-back but found only slightly more success with that than I had with Old Norse. This has remained true to the present. So has my desire to return to each, flawed as it may be. As my visit to Spain nears, I wonder what effect it will have on me. I can hope to arrive and be caught up in the hum of Spanish life, coaxed all the more by whatever fragments of its language still shelter in my brain. I can hope they’ll come out to breathe, even if it takes a little booze or they’re met with insistence that the locals’ English is better. I can hope I’ll choose to learn all over again.

Eric Beebe is a graduate of The Mountainview Low-Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction. He currently works as a substitute teacher for grades K–12 in New Hampshire.

The Magic Wand

My Life as a Serial Linguist