ShareThe Jester’s Parcels is an autobiographical short story about childhood terror. Enjoy…
THE JESTER’S PARCELS
by Ranjit Singh Mathoda
created and copyright October 14, 1989
He is white of face, with blue and silver diamonds etched and painted upon his grim visage, one below each eye, as if he cried. His grim lips purse in concentration as he reaches into a gray bag at his belt, pulling forth a fasces, and tosses the glimmering reed smothered axe upon the currents of the air. And then, in my mind’s eye, the jester reaches his hand in the bag again, pulling forth five objects attached by string, which he studies momentarily and then throws up as well.
But now the axe of momentary might falls, clattering loudly to the floor, followed soon thereafter by the bundle of five plastic parcels…
~
It is just a spelling book, I cry to myself in futile rage emblazoned by the tension of the moment. There is no need to go back to the classroom to get it. My mother walks along side me, up the sloping hill and the ring shaped asphalt drive, oblivious to the frenzied emotions which rise now within me, past the large square shaped high school to which I never went.
Past this she walks alongside me, past the field upon which in winter we sled, until she has passed the rusting playground.
It is the side entrance of the elementary school that we approach now, making our way through a hot and humid day made hotter by the emotions which run throughout my frame. Down steps of concrete, whose handrails are some metal smothered in black paint, and into the musty dark bowels of the school. I follow her until she stops abruptly. I grimace as if pain had been inflicted, but she does not see this sign of my discomfort.
“Which way, Ronny?” she asks, unsuspecting of the terror filling and gnawing at me.
“I’ll get it, Mom,” I answer, after first having come to the silent conclusion that she would not accept any excuse yet in my mind for turning back.
“That’s Okay, I want to see your classroom,” my dearest mother says, causing my brain to swagger and swoon from the pressure as I frantically search for an excuse.
I turn right, walk up a flight of stairs, and am momentarily blinded by the sunlight in the hallway. Dust lazily drifts upwards until brought against the uncleaned windows in the hallway. Four doors down is the dreaded object of my looming demise.
I hesitate, and deciding it might be best if I accidentally lose her, I speed up, skimming down the hallway at what would be termed, if I were a horse, a fast gallop.
This approach, however, fails.
“Ronny, slow down,” she calls, moving up the hallway until she stands unwittingly beside the door. “Isn’t this the door to your classroom?”
I nod, muttering that I must have missed it. I push the door, half hoping that it is locked, but find that the opposite is the case. Terror grows in my child-sized heart, filling my no doubt soon-to-be-wearied body.
There is the object, a rectangular desk with a white top, and a connected seat. Scribbling, undecipherable scribbling, lies upon that white sheet, but that is not what speeds up my heart till it beats at a pace nearly impossible to attain.
I skip over to my desk, and reach my hands into the opening facing the seat. With perhaps, too slow a motion, I push back the five bundles of plastic which are the heart of my traumatic experience, and pull out the object for which my parent and I have come: the spelling notebook which I had forgotten.
Having pulled it out at the same time as I quite skillfully pushed the plastic bags forward, I clutch my bounty to my chest and rush towards the class room door.
Yet something forebodes ill upon my character, a hint of danger. I halt, and turn. “Mom, you coming?” I ask with a tone of tired impatience.
She halts, and gazes at my desk, then stoops halfway and gazes in. I jump nonchalantly back to my prior position near the desk, and attempt to block her line of sight to the innards of that great desk, and especially those five parceled plastic bags. I cry and moan, implore and beg, and finally scream excuses, all for the express purpose of dissuading her from checking the desk of its belongings.
It is to no avail. With maternal sternness, she pushes my flailing hands aside, pays no attention to her poor, sob-crippled, moaning son, and surveys the inside of the desk.
And then, from the interior she pulls five parcels wrapped in plastic as I shriek hysterically. Each is, in various states of decay, a sandwich I had not wanted to eat.
~
The Jester smiles in memory, carefully picks up the emotion-filled, feeling-drenched sandwiches, and dumps them into the deep trash pit known as the subconscious. Then, pulling himself straight, he lifts up the fasces, and pulls forth from the bag the laurel wreath of fame, placing it upon his brow, above that logical and sagacious mind. Having thus removed the rulership of emotion, he stretches himself, and begins to juggle.
~ The End ~
You can find more of my stories at http://mathoda.com/stories.
