The classroom was speckled with dust and a roaming feeling of uneasiness. The clock ticked in the background, like a—
"Heartbeats are strange." Her voice was light, almost invisible like the dust trailing onto her floral dress.
The teacher raised an eyebrow and stopped writing on the old, run-down board. "Excuse me?"
"We are learning about the unsettling awareness of our own heartbeat, sir. Does that not scare you? Knowing that the tenuous muscular throbbing feels less like a metronome—but rather than a nervous song your heart taps against your veins to remind itself that it has not yet fallen into the hands of death?"
Freak.
She turned around to watch the scrawny boy mutter underneath his rough breath.
"No," she got up, "you will not call me a name since my thoughts don't fall into your brain of emptiness."
His eyes lost the laughter in between the pupils as he let the words swim past his ears.
"You will not classify me as a word that should be effaced from existence. You will not. Why? Because words that slip out so easily out of your lips and anyone else's make that heartbeat slow down until they die. And if you don't understand this then—listen to heartbeats as you say those words. What happens?"
He shrugged, trying to hide the fact of truth coming from the girl's lips.
"One less person on the planet."
YOU ARE READING
therapy
Short Story"they told us that we needed therapy, as if medication and tainted words could fix broken toys."
