She conducted a symphony of sadism with flourishes of a red pen in the place of a conductor’s baton; the streaks, dripping with blood, sprang from the pen’s tip onto his newly finished work. He stood quietly as a cacophony of indignant voices echoed off the hollow walls of his psyche while he witnessed her indifferent hand brutalizing his story. It was a poison pen.

Weeks of work (or, at least, weeks’ worth of work) were tarnished without even the courtesy of a second reading. He had been given the assignment quite a while back, but decided that he worked best under pressure and had concluded that the night before the due date was the best possible time for him to complete his written work. Regardless, he had spent several hours doing his utmost to create the best he could offer, though his teacher always claimed that his essays lacked “voice” or had faulty sentence structure, nonstandard grammar, or incomplete thoughts. He wondered if the great authors of centuries passed could stand up to the strict interpretation of the English language to which he was subjected. Would Fitzgerald or Hemmingway be able to get by; let alone Hawthorne with his monstrous sentences, or Shakespeare, who simply made up words where he was lacking?

How was he supposed to develop the all-important “voice” if he was not allowed to speak? He often found himself wondering if he should follow in the steps of Twain and make all his diction colloquial. However, he had no great social strife to battle; no strong opinions to defend; no vendettas. In truth, the most outraged he had been in a great while was at that very moment while he stood and watched his paper colored red.

Maybe he should consult the principal to aid him in his struggle to salvage what remained of his paper. If he did so, what could his argument be? That the teacher didn’t treat him like an accomplished author? In truth, he didn’t have a leg to stand on in that fight. Realizing this, he leaned against a wall to steady himself. What a dizzying thing it was to have opinions.

He immediately recalled that many great authors had endured problems in English classes just as Einstein had at points had trouble in mathematics. Maybe his new tactic should be to have such dissenting opinions that his teacher failed him; that would almost certainly cement his place among the decomposing bones of the great authors of his native tongue. Well, perhaps not. Failure would not suffice to ensure his inclusion in the literary canon without certainty of genius.

A bad home life might be a better alternative to talent. A difficult upbringing supplied challenges and obstacles to overcome and provided a person with a skewed outlook that others found intriguing. Besides, people love interesting backstories. However, burning bridges with family members and sabotaging relationships seemed like a lot to go through just for eternal glory. Perhaps his real problem was that he was too sentimental. If he had the guts to burn familial bridges he probably wouldn’t care quite as much about the silly paper he had just turned in and then his confidence would translate into talent. What a vicious cycle.

She had been dueling his paper with her red saber for a very long time now and his unease mounted. Surely she was carefully reading it for clever wordplay, masterfully worded phrases and innovative themes. Or perhaps she so intensely hated it upon the first reading that she had gone into shock and needed to read it over once more to confirm her fears that, as a teacher, she had failed to teach a student the basic tenets of the English language. Maybe she had just taken her inadequacy as a teacher to the next logical conclusion and had begun to plot her suicide later that night. After handing back his failing paper, she would usher him out of her classroom, lock the door behind them both, and travel to her car. She might stop on the way to her small studio apartment and purchase a cup of coffee and bottle of Tylenol from a local gas station. She would crawl into the bathtub and take the entire bottle of small chalky pills and close her eyes. Maybe she had an old, heavy revolver that she would play Russian roulette with as a final attempt at any degree of merriment before her eventual death. Of course she would reflect upon the obvious outcome that killing oneself in such a manner would only result in dying a loser. Finally, the pills would take effect and she would slip into the lukewarm water as her organ systems shut down one by one. What was it that he had written about…?

“See you tomorrow, Mr. Michaels,” she said abruptly with the weary smile.
He jumped as reality plucked him from the pit of his angst and took the paper from her hand, slung his backpack over one shoulder, and exited the room into the hallway. He pushed open the double doors leading to the student parking lot and squinted as the late afternoon sun taunted him with its cheerful embrace. He looked down at his paper, which more closely resembled a coloring book page in red-scale than an essay, and directed his eyes to the top-right corner: “B-.” He stuffed the essay into his backpack and threw it into the trunk of his car.
Out of sight, out of mind.