A war on dots and dashes
Furious, she scored a diagonal through the page in blood-red ink. When would they learn? Spelling and punctuation mattered. Two out of ten. The mark fell like a death sentence but she had no regrets. She picked up the next composition. “There not their,” she muttered, circling the offending word in red. “Not there,” her parrot echoed. She glared at it, then squinted at the pupil’s name. He was one of the worst. Spelling awry. Punctuation amok. Sentences a shambles. Construction chaotic. Did he do it deliberately? Was there some perverse pleasure to be had in making her blood boil? “Weight!” You’d have thought it was a swear word, the way she spat it out. “Not wait!” she added. “Wait!” the parrot swore. She shook her fist at the bird but it just stared back, unperturbed.
A toffee could have written better English. Now there was an appealing idea. She unwrapped one of the harder sort and, tossing the paper on her desk, stuffed the sweet in her mouth. She read on, chewing with such vigour her jaws ached. If she’d had her way the youth would have been expelled long ago. Were not where she scrawled in red. The subsequent sentence was so drawn out and convoluted it had her gasping for air. “Breathe for God’s sake,” she spluttered. “God’s sake,” the parrot intoned. Such cryptic remarks were wasted on these dimwits. Exactly. Waste, not waist. The page was redder than a battlefield. All dead words and red gashes. She shut her eyes and ran a hand across her brow. Her skin was clammy, a migraine coming on.
In comparison, her feet were cold and wet. Wet? Her eyes flew open to discover she was standing barefoot in a pool of pitch black water. Perplexed, she dipped a cautious finger in the viscous liquid and sniffed. She knew that smell. That was no water. It was Indian ink. She stared in horror at her soot-black feet then flung herself sideways, only just clearing the puddle. Her trajectory left a dirty smear across the smooth white surface. She landed with a jolt, her stained feet skidding sideways, sending her skating along a straight path. It was not wet. To her relief. But black and slippery. Reaching the end, she swung violently to the right along another path akin to the line atop a ‘T’, only to halt on the verge of an immense ‘O’ where she fell flat on her face.
She sat trying to scrub ink from her hands to no effect. Giving up in disgust she scrambled to her feet. The moment she was upright, the nib of a giant fountain pen danced a red circle around her, knocking her legs from under her. She squealed as she tumbled into yet another puddle. Rolling free, she crawled out on all fours. Ink dripped from her hair and trailed from her clothes tracing a rogue path through otherwise neat forms. Hearing an ominous whoosh, she glanced up to see the nib plunging straight at her. She dived to the side as the tip scratched the soft surface where she had squatted only seconds before, splattering her red.
The nib rose, no doubt readying to strike again. Ignoring the black forms crisscrossing beneath her feet, she wove her way, darting left and right at random, her breath catching in gasps in her throat. Again and again, the nib struck, although ink was the only thing that hit her. The blows became ever more frenetic until the nib drove down with such force it buckled and impaled itself only inches from her. Red ink flooded from its broken tip forming an ever-growing pool. Scouring splotches of red from her eyes and face with blackened fingers, she scampered away, careening across the blotchy surface till it abruptly ran out. She had reached the edge of the page and the end of her luck. The notebook slammed shut.
The shock of that thunderous demise and the unending darkness that fell, like a final full stop that wouldn’t swerve from its resolve, undid her. She burst into tears, her whole being wracked by uncontrollable sobs. The fathomless grief jolted her back to the present and she cracked open blurry eyes. Tears rolled down her cheeks and fell on the disconsolate composition, mingling black and red in an incomprehensible muddle. All sense had been washed from it. There was no way she could piece it back together. Nothing of the wayward story had stuck in her mind. For all her strident complaints, she hadn’t really read it. A renewed wave of remorse rolled over her and bore her away.