The worst thing

It marked, coincidentally, the end of their relationship. It had been an interesting experience – the relationship and the writing exercise both.

She was an English teacher and he couldn’t remember how the idea had arisen, nor why it had seemed a good idea at the time, but for a while she had assigned him the assignments she gave to her pupils. It had seemed fun. It was possible that his poem about a bird was at least equal to that of her teenage students.

What turned out to be the final topic, though they did not suspect it at the time, was a strange thing to ask anyone to write about, more likely to encourage fiction than clear honesty, for who could face such truth. He wondered later what the youths in the English class had written on the topic – ‘The worst thing I ever did’.

Would he, as a teen, have had the perception to write the same account he wrote now? He could have, since it was an account of an event that occurred when he was twelve years old.

Four long pages of small, tight scrawl he wrote. One sentence might have summed it up but there was context and explication and attempts at mitigation to pad the bald statement.

At school, a deadline is a deadline and you are stuck with your English teacher all year. As an adult, there was always the possibility you might split up with your English teacher before your assignment was due and you would be spared the trauma of assessment.

He left the pages hidden in the bottom drawer of his desk. Later, he quietly threw them away – he would not face it again.



Barnaby McBryde