Anyway, here's my take on Challenge 68, it took a while to come out - a variation of Woolf's 'Mark on the Wall' :-)
Challenge 68 - The Hole in the Wall
(elements, rock, paper, scissors, shaving cream)
What exactly did
we ever do in those school breaks, those thousands of endless breaks between
lessons? It seems such a waste now, all that running around, playing football,
picking on the weak kid, playing kiss chase, inventing some stupid game which
involved a tennis ball and large empty wall, and basically talking rubbish
throughout. Why didn’t we study, why didn’t we try to better ourselves when we
had the chance? Why didn’t we listen when the teacher asked us to study for the
test, do the project, or stop throwing paper at each other? Now look at us,
stuck in deadend jobs, paying the bills, breeding more fodder for the system to
chew on and spit out.
There was one
teacher, I remember now, only one, who tried to wake us up. But one wasn’t
enough. He gave us an opportunity to think, to have an opinion, to question
things around us, both close to home and globally. No tests every other lesson,
no punishment for late homework, only bad marks if we didn’t do right. He used
to let us play, too, but in what he called an educational way. One game I
really didn’t like back then was ’rock, paper, scissors’. What the hell was
that all about? He told us it originated in China way back, and has been used
to settle small trivial arguments ever since. I didn’t get it then and, as he
always encouraged us to do, I questioned its logic. Sure, rock blunts scissors,
and scissors cuts paper, but paper covers rock? No, I wasn’t having that. I
even tried to show him that paper doesn’t stop a flying rock with a few ill
fated experiments. His point was that it covered the rock. I then said you
might as well cover it with shaving cream or some kind of foam, or a box,
maybe. He said that a box was made of cardboard, which is paper, but he liked
my idea of shaving cream. He opened it up to the class, that if paper changed
to shaving cream, what could the other two objects be? Razor was easy as a
substitute for scissors but the others got stumped on the rock. Looking at the
teacher, it came to me in a flash. His face. The silence in the classroom was
broken by the teacher’s laughter. Yes, razor scrapped away shaving cream,
shaving cream covered his face, and his face blunted the razor. He gave me a
good mark for that one, but he then asked me how I was going to represent
them…that’s when the idea fell apart.
I wonder what
ever became of that teacher? Last thing I heard was that he’d written a book
and got it published, though I don’t think he was famous or anything. And what
about all of us, the thinkers, the opinionated argumentatives? Menial jobs,
most of us, but I did learn one thing. The pen is mightier than the sword.
Paper covers rock.
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