#onehourstories

He awoke feeling the little toy parts in his mouth, and the dream lingered.

Ken had a tendency to have disturbing dreams but he blew them off because they didn't survive the light of day. But when he brushed his teeth he had a moment when he felt he dislodged something, and had a strange certainty it was a yellow Lego man head.
It wasn't. Of course it wasn't. It was his brain and his tongue playing tricks on him.
During homeroom, he was talking to the class about the March Break assignment when he felt a scratchiness in his throat, like he'd swallowed something awkward. He finished what he was saying and then told them to do silent reading for a bit.

Lindsay followed him out of the classroom.

"Mr. Rand, are you OK?" she said, giving him a sympathetic look with her big blue eyes.
"I'm fine, Lindsay," Ken said. "Bit of a sore throat." He tried to smile, but also felt a bit nauseous.

She stood there, gazing at him from under her curly blonde hair, until he pointed back at the room. "Keep an eye on things in there for me, will ya?"

She gave Ken a pleased smile at this responsibility, as he knew she would, and disappeared into the class with a whish of her blue kilt.

On his way to the staff bathroom Ken worried that the other kids had felt something awry, but decided it was just Lindsay's uncanny perceptiveness that had twigged her. She was mature, in a lot of ways.

A lot of ways, echoed a voice from Ken's reptilian brain that he ignored. Consciously, he hoped that she'd gotten past her schoolgirl crush on him. She seemed to be focusing on her schoolwork again -- her essay on African rites-of-passage was the best in the Comparative Religion class.

The staff washroom was locked, and a quick knock got him no response. Might have been out of order.

Ken reluctantly made his way to the boy's room. He checked all the stalls, and to his relief he had the place to himself -- for now. He got into one stall, locked it, and got down on his knees, trying to ignore the caked -on grime and the smell of piss. It wasn't healthy, but he was compelled to put two fingers down his throat.

He'd never done it before, and the first two times just induced gagging, but the third time -- like a yanked mower cord -- produced the desired results, a torrent of vomit that he contained to the bowl.

It was entirely liquid -- no plastic toy parts at all. He stared at it and willed himself to feel relieved. Experiment attempted, findings nil. He got up and flushed, let himself out of the stall to a luckily still empty bathroom. He hadn't relished the idea of having to convince a student he wasn't a secret bulimic.

Back in the classroom, Lindsay was breaking up small pieces of grey tubing she'd found in the bottom of her brother's Lego box -- it was packaging of some sort. After she got a piece off she'd feed it to Mr. Rand -- not the fake Mr. Rand, the one who'd just come back into the classroom and given her a fake smile, but the real Mr. Rand, the soft one. The one who loved her back.

"What's with the doll, Linds?" whispered Paula, pointing at her lap.

Lindsay smiled and shrugged, put one last piece of plastic into Mr. Rand's mouth, and then tucked him away into her backpack.