Broken, Grave

Nomzamo

I took in a deep breath, standing in front of my class, watching as they all wrote the test. I kept my eyes peeled for any cheaters, while at the same time, my fingers clutched onto the thick worksheets between my fingertips. I slowly walked down the row, headed towards a student that elicited a reaction out of me that was unlike anything before. There was something about Nicolaas that bothered me, something about him that just didn’t make sense for some strange reason, I couldn’t explain it. He felt…sinister, evil, dark. That’s all I could say. I hadn’t even heard the boy speak, yet I’d already come to such conclusions. 

I stood before his table, while for some students I’d have to bend down in order to speak to them, Nicolaas was a giant and I remained standing straight. I still felt myself lean in a bit, “I’m sorry to disturb you while you’re writing the paper,” I whispered with a bit of a grimace at the fact that I’d become that teacher that interrupts students while they’re writing a test. He slowly looked up from his paper, the black pen in his right hand, dancing between his fingers as he tapped on the table, his steel blue eyes connecting with mine wordlessly. 

It felt like the world had stilled as his eyes looked into mine and it felt like the trees in themselves had stopped their function of producing oxygen because I tried to breathe but nothing filled my lungs. I looked at the boy before me, my eyes blinking for a moment as that darkness in those steel blue eyes like I’d seen the first time I looked in them, snuck in, but not as much. Today, his steel blue eyes shined bright. 

God, what a beautiful child this was, I could imagine he’d only get better with age. He was so handsome, it hurt. 

I parted my lips, trying to speak but the intensity of his stare was so great that I struggled with doing such. I felt like I was standing before the devil himself for some reason, the goosebumps on my arms made it feel like he was worth me taking several steps back. There were butterflies in my stomach as his steel blue eyes peered unblinkingly into my own. I don’t know how, but I managed to break my eyes away, instead looking down at his paper, seeing that he was still on the first page, doing the problems there. It was a two page test that I’d designed for my students, on a lone A4 sheet with several extra sheets for their answers. Even in high school as a tutor, I was known for my challenging tests. 

In university I was the one who wrote the tests for the students, and I’d get paid extra for it by my lecturer and the university. I had a mathematical brain, something that I’d gotten from my extremely intelligent father who seemed to only think in numbers. I was the only one from the three of my siblings who’d been as gifted as he was. “Erm,” I cleared my throat again, “I noticed that you missed three days of school,” I began, turning my eyes to the pages that I held in my hands, “this is all of the work that we did in your absence-” I placed the papers on the edge of his desk, not wanting to let him grab them from me. “So, if you need any help in doing any of this, pleas-”

“What the fuck are you wearing?” he snapped, cutting me off. I snapped my eyes to his, shocked at his words. The steel blue eyes that I had been staring into just a few moments ago, were no more. Suddenly, there was a darkness that seemed to cloud his eyes as he spoke to me, his voice not snappy or angry, but deeply malicious, dripping with a darkness that felt as sinister as the devil’s laugh. 

“E-e…excuse me?” my words were filled with shock as I tried to make sense of what I was sure I’d heard. He didn’t answer me, instead the pencil he held in his hand fell onto the table, rolling itself to the ground as if attempting to escape the monster that was about to be unleashed. I let out a surprised gasp when his hand snapped to my throat, wrapping around it and gripping it tightly as those eyes of his suddenly looked as dark as the abyss. My hands reached out to grab his hand on my throat, trying to release the pressure as I looked at him with wide open eyes of shock, struggling to breathe.