The room is cold. She is visibly shaking, as her teacher looks critically at her papier-mâché skeleton. This girl is frightened unlike she’s ever been. The teacher turns her figure back to its creator.
“Would you call this a satisfactory piece of art?”
“Yes, I think so,” the girl weakly replies. “I worked really hard on it,” she stammers. Her heart is pumping strongly.
“Have you really worked hard on it, Miss? You’ve missed a lot of my classes, and this skeleton reflects you lack of artistic ability. You didn’t paint the nails holding your skeleton to the stand. You can see the wires beneath the newspaper, so clearly you should have put more around it. The face is poorly drawn, and I have much more criticism where that comes from.”
The girl is standing there, shaking like a leaf, fighting the burning of tears welling in her eyes. Her teacher points evilly at the skeleton she worked very hard on. She feels a deep-rooted cough rising into her lungs. The girl begins explaining to her Art teacher why she’s been so absent, just as that barky cough makes its crude presence known. The teacher wants none of her excuses, and barely passes her artwork with a 68%. She sends the girl off with her skeleton for Día de los Muertos, which the girl promptly trashes upon exiting the classroom.
“Goddamn bitch of an Art teacher,” she mutters, heading for her locker.
No comments:
Post a Comment