Crumbs

She looked over the top of her desk to where I sat across the room from her.

“Well?” She clipped expectantly.

I could hear the clock ticking in perfect syncopation with the tap tap tapping of her pen against her board. The black hands of the clock march around the face – a macabre waltz towards doom.

Everything watches, impatiently.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

My telltale heartbeat shakes the inside of me like the giant clanging of a bell, reverberating off the walls, haunting and nightmarish. I open my mouth, sucking the air in through my teeth…then let it out again, without saying a word. My eyes flicker to the clock; black hands stride on as if they can’t be stopped.

A perfectly pencilled eyebrow lifts, arching, and dares me to continue.

She knows she’s got me now. I can tell by the way she smiles at me from her cast iron desk, pointed pearly whites peeking through heavily painted lips. Even her nameplate glints menacingly at me from its place atop her mahogany desk.

Tick, tick, tick.

March, march, march.

Death march.

I see double now – four black hands become a blur of motion. I swallow with an audible click and her grin only widens. An image of the Cheshire cat immediately pops into my head and I had to resist the urge to laugh hysterically. No one laughs in her classroom and no one laughs at her.

Not if they wish to live to see another day.

“Come now Patrick, we’re all friends here. There’s absolutely no need to keep secrets from one another. This is not the first time that you’ve failed to submit your homework to me on time, and I need to know why Patrick.” She leaned forward, waiting for my answer, positively gleeful at the prospect of carving a big, red F onto my report, or better yet, sentencing me to three months worth of detention.

I thought back to the weekend…Spot had been particularly on edge after the visit to the vet, barking constantly and chewing on the shoe laces. Who would have thought that she would find a new object to chew on, namely my just completed assignment – a perfect diorama of the pyramids and sphinx of Giza.

Certainly not me.

I walked in just in time to see Spot swallow the last side of a paper maché pyramid with a satisfying gulp…

And there you have it. The end of the end of my short-lived life. The final bow before the curtain closes, because I know that I’m not going to live through this encounter with the reason I’m giving.

I look up from my lap, and she’s still peering at me, that grin twisting on her lips. Hastily, I wipe my clammy hands on my grey trousers. My throat constricts, but I force my mouth to form the needed words.

“This may sound like I’m making it up, but…”