With the third grade classroom dimly lit in shades of
purple, puppet children on strings danced and twirled their way through the
door. The girls wore pretty red dresses and had their blond hair in pigtails.
The boys wore elegant blue tuxedos and were shaven completely bald. This waltz
of perfect conformity was accompanied by the PA system’s glorious soundtrack of
the Moonlight Sonata. The rhythm carried the puppet children to their desks one
row at a time so as not to cause unnecessary disorder. Once they had taken
their seats, the puppets slouched over with their pale white faces and rosy
cheeks touching their desks.
Their strings jerked them to the upright position while
another puppet descended at the chalkboard in a heap. With another tug of the
strings, the clown lady with rainbow hair, a distorted face, and a frilly white
dress reassembled and proceeded to write her name on the chalkboard. As she
wrote, she sang a “happy birthday” style rendition of her class greeting in a
condescending, Shakespearean voice. “Good morning to you. Good morning to you.
Good morning dear children…”
She signaled for her students to speak up with a wave of her
hand. And true to form, they completed the song in perfect unison with, “Good
morning to you!”
“Very good, dear children!” said the teacher while
curtseying, still using her hammy stage voice. “My name is Aloysius Striker,
but you may all call me Mrs. Striker. And my, don’t you all look lovely today!
All smiles, tight strings, and not a single misstep in the morning song. No
disorder among you all. Do you know why? Because we are all part of something
much greater than ourselves. We have the same dreams. The same desires. We are
all part of…a community!”
Mrs. Striker quickly erased her name from the board and
wrote in its place the word of the day, community. “Now class, would any of you
like to tell me what a community is? Don’t be too shy to speak up. Your grade
depends on it!” The last sentence was punctuated with a mock whip strike with
her piece of chalk.
All at once, the puppets rotated their heads three hundred
sixty degrees and said, “A community is a gathering of people who have
something in common!”
“Excellent, children! You’ve made me very proud already! But
what are some examples of communities? Oh, do please speak up. We’re all part
of a community, after all!” sang Mrs. Striker.
“Churches!” said the puppets, to which Mrs. Striker gave a
celebratory, “Yes!” and quickly chalked it on the board. Other examples the
children gave were shopping centers, police departments, congress, and yes,
even school. That last answer sent an orgasmic chill throughout Mrs. Striker’s
puppet body. She even gave a sing-songy laugh.
And then the teacher’s demonic smile turned to a saggy frown
when she saw one student in the back corner of the class with his head tucked
firmly in his hands. No puppet strings, no puppet face, no handsome tuxedo,
just a shadow silhouette and glowing green eyes. Mrs. Striker tiptoed towards
this lonely student like a ballerina and towered over him with a vengeful
sneer.
“Look who decided to join us today, class. Mr. Scott George,
the so-called introvert! The so-called shy guy! The little boy who hasn’t
crackled a smile since the day he was born! Let me show you how it’s done, Mr.
George!” The children’s heads turned one hundred eighty degrees and their
puppet strings morphed their faces into insane grins with monstrous teeth and
worms in the backs of their throats. “See? It’s not so hard, little Scotty! But
in all seriousness, why haven’t you spoke up with the rest of the class? Don’t
you want to be part of a community?”
Surveying the ghastly smiles around him, Scott brushed his
teacher off with his hand and said, “Not really.”
Mrs. Striker’s elongated nose touched with Scott’s forehead
before she chirped, “Well, that’s tough cookies, Mr. George! Your grade depends
on your participation! Your ability to get a job depends on your sociability!
You are indeed part of this society whether you want to be or not!”
The teacher clutched Scott’s wrist with a death grip as she
dragged the shadowy student kicking and screaming towards the chalkboard, all
while the puppet students pointed and laughed at him. By the time Scott made it
to the chalkboard, Mrs. Striker grabbed him by the scruff of his neck to pull him
up and placed the piece of chalk in his hand. “Now then! This is your next
assignment, Mr. George, and you shall not screw this up for your fellow
students, but most of all, for me! I want you to write on this blackboard
another example of a community! Post-haste! Chop-chop!”
Scott George shivered and cowered, barely able to keep the
chalk in his hands while the students giggled at him through their noses and
closed mouths. Sweat poured off of him like rain while the purple lighting
turned to a single bright halogen spotlight on him. He swallowed hard and
stared at the chalkboard like a monkey doing a math problem. All of these
examples of a community and he couldn’t come up with one…until he piggybacked
off of the shopping center answer.
With slow precision and squeakiness that made the puppet
children squint and hold their ears, Scott wrote something on the chalkboard
without actually seeing what it was. It seemed as though hours went by and a
whole tidal wave of sweat poured off of his body. But then he finished writing
what he was going to write and breathed an anxiety-crushing sigh of relief. The
pregnancy-sized knot reformed in his stomach when Scott saw the children
laughing their asses off as well as Mrs. Striker staring at the blackboard in
wide-eyed horror. “Shopping carts?!” she cried in disbelief. “Shopping carts?!”
As the laughter got louder and Mrs. Striker’s dramatic sighs
grew more obvious, Scott’s crippling anxiety morphed into white hot rage. His
boiling blood gave third degree burns on his tender flesh. His neon green eyes
bulged out of their sockets. Every vein in his arms and forehead looked like a
stick of dynamite ready to blow. His fists were clenched tightly enough to turn
even the strongest metals into powder.
In one volcanic scream, he belted, “Shut up!” before picking
up a text book off of a student’s desk and smashing him over the head with it.
The teacher and students alike gasped in horror as the unfortunate student’s
head exploded into a pile of worms and maggots, his body limp and lifeless. The
puppet strings had no choice but to pull him into the heavens while Scott
watched in horror at his own sins. Students cried maggots out of their eyeballs
while Mrs. Striker sobbed blood.
“Oh, Scott! How could you do such a thing to your own
community?!” asked the teacher. “Now the whole system is going to crash down
upon us! Why, oh, why! WHY?!” With his head hung and his voice sheepishly low,
Scott muttered a nearly incoherent apology before Mrs. Striker burst into
flames and clutched his wrist with purpling tightness yet again. “Oh, I’m
afraid an apology’s not going to be enough, Mr. George! You’ve been causing
grief to my class for far too long! Your refusal to obey even the simplest
commands makes me sick to my stomach! I’m afraid there’s only one thing left to
do!”
The puppet strings yanked every child back into the heavens
while the classroom burst into a fiery hell all around Mrs. Striker and the
convulsing Scott George. The teacher smashed every desk into splinters with one
punch and in their place ascended a torture chair with leather straps and a
ball gag.
“No, Mrs. Striker! Have mercy on me! I’ll be a good boy! I
promise!” pleaded Scott, who was bound and gagged to the chair with
constricting tightness. He tried to thrash around and break free, but with a
ball gag cutting off his air supply, he quickly became exhausted. It became
even harder to breathe when Mrs. Striker shoved a funnel up one of his nostrils
and held it in place with duct tape.
“You’re going to conform, Mr. George, whether you want to or
not!” warned Mrs. Striker in a deep, devilish voice. She tore open the flesh on
her own wrist and pulled out a handful of worms with razor sharp fangs and
hooks. Scott tried once again to squirm and thrash in his bindings, but they
only cut deeper into his skin. With a sick smile and Scott’s gagged pleas, Mrs.
Striker shoved the razorblade worms into the funnel and watched them fest up
his nose and into his brain. The children descended back down into the hellfire
scene and repeatedly chanted along with the teacher, “One of us!”
After an eternity of having his skull feasted on, the
present day eighteen-year-old Scott George awoke from his nightmare with a deep
gasp of air and pulsating nausea. As soon as he caught his breath, the teenager
looked around the room for his digital clock, which read five-thirty in the
morning. Relieved that this was a dream and that he still had hours before he
had to get up for school, Scott plopped backwards into his bed and burped his
nausea away.
“Why does this keep happening?” Scott whispered to himself.
“I hate falling asleep.” Tears formed in his eyes when he realized that the
only thing fake about his nightmare was the psychedelic backdrop in which it
took place. He never dropped acid or smoked marijuana a day in his life. Why
was he being punished for it? And most of all, why did he have to take a United States
history class with a teacher who was basically Mrs. Striker with a penis?
Knowing that class was his first period of the day caused
Scott to skyrocket out of his bed and dry heave in his garbage bucket. No
matter how hard he puked, all that came out of his mouth was tiny streams of
snot and orange stuff he couldn’t identify. Once he had finished, he sat next
to his desk and breathed heavily while fighting the urge to go back to sleep.
“Goddamn you, Mr. Simpson,” whispered Scott. “Why doesn’t somebody go Columbine
on his ass already?”
