Today's Napowrimo prompt tasks writers with recounting a childhood memory. Here is one of those.
[injustice crawls from under the fire doors. our hero, 8 and a rule follower, listens at the end of his elementary school gym class. let the record show it was raining outside]
gym teacher, with all of the authority of a blowhard: I don't want to hear voices.
a peer, talking: words, etc.
me to the peer: he just said stop talking.
gym teacher, to me: and your name is on the board. [let the record show that this was a punishment our hero was not eager to report home]
me, aggrieved, to gym teacher: but I was telling her to stop talking.
gym teacher, getting progressively angry and lecturing me, probably misusing a word and generally being a caricature of his role: words I don't remember. some variable of "I am the god of this elementary school gymnasium and you, pitiful 8 year old, will give me tithes."
me, feeling the slight of authority's half-nelson, probably crying: this isn't fair.
my classroom teacher, arriving and huddling with the gym teacher: inaudible whispers.
me, hoping for vindication, thinking to myself: today, a wrong will be righted.
[silent walk back to class. tension rippling through the air fused with the smell of the hallway lunch cart's lingering odor. peas and some unnamed meat.]
my teacher, closing out the day and awarding the good behavior award that [let the record show] I never once received: thank you, ______ [let the record show this was my peer who was initially talking], for waiting patiently for your award since I had to deal with that situation. [let the record show that my behavior was the implied situation].
[moments pass. our hero is in the car with his mother explaining the day].
me, observing the rain on the windshield; feeling each second of the slowed, school-dismissal-in-a-too-small-town traffic conspiring against an easy arrival, against refuge; staring at the blur of light and water and the war of windshield wipers and their squeak on conditioned glass: it's just pathetic.
[let the record show it still is]
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