The Spire

Hannah Johnson ‘21

Fortune Teller

Though it’s been long abandoned, there were yet a few scavengers living amongst the remains of the Holy Cross campus, and among these few, there lived an oracle on the ground floor of Williams. She was unknown until the Day of Reckoning, when she had foretold of the darkness. This is how the legend goes…

Classes began on a Tuesday, and the last remaining scavengers gathered on campus on that Monday, the day before. The oracle lived in a cave flowing with the vapors of sanitizer and cleaning products, and on that Monday, before the Day of Reckoning, she emerged from her cave and addressed the scavengers.

“I sense a coming darkness,” she proclaimed. “Our classes will not begin so smoothly.”

“What do you mean?” asked the scavengers.

“Those of us who are here will Zoom into no classes on the morrow,” she replied. “The networks will go dark and we will be stranded.”

The scavengers of the campus were naysayers. “But how can you know this? We have only just arrived.”

“Not I. You all have just arrived, but I have been here as long as the trees and the Fenwick ivy. I have lived within Loyola and I have built my temple in Williams. I have long used this internet for my studies, and yet today I have not had a stable connection to the wireless network for longer than a fortminute.”

“She is crazy!” shouted the naysaying scavengers. “She has gone mad, perhaps with the virus. Or her computer is broken!”

“You will see,” the oracle simply answered them. “You will see.”

The night of Monday passed into Tuesday morning, and from the dawn there was no internet to be found all across campus, on the first day of classes. And so, the scavengers knew that the oracle had spoken the truth. The darkness was so severe that the students told the professors they could not Zoom, and no one swiped into the Kimball Feasting Room that day, for there were no systematic connections. This Reckoning lasted until the sun was high over Worcester that day. And so goes the legend of the Oracle of Williams.