Early Release, Teaching Her A Lesson (Patreon)

So you know how I said I had all those other things to work on? Yeah, well, men plan, and god laughs. I had a chance encounter the other day (and of all the times you'd think odds of chance encounters were minimized!), and I wound up getting obsessed with this idea to the point that I just stayed up the past 24 hours churning this out. 

This story is the closest I'll ever come to autobiographical. The first four thousand words are so are, with only minor embellishments, true events. (I admittedly mashed the tantrum and the chapstick incident from the story into the same day; I think they occurred a few days apart in real life.) I've shared before that I used to be in teaching, and I swear to god, I will never forget this freaking student from my early years. Then she walks up to me at the grocery store the other day, her kid at her side, chats me up like she wasn't the same person who tried to start a round of elated slow clapping when I told my classes I wasn't coming back the next year. (Not that I'm still bitter. :P)

The protagonist, Mr. Canon, isn't quite me as a teacher, but we'd have gotten along well enough I expect. I was a lot less structured and much more off the cuff -- (my one letter in my file was for an epic spiel about turning in their essays on time, something to the effect of, "If you come in tomorrow with no paper and a sob story about how your house caught fire and, knowing I wouldn't accept excuses, your whole family charged into the inferno to rescue your essay and were all killed by the fire, I'll drive out to the smoldering ashes of your house, urinate on their ashes, and flunk you on their fiery graves. NO EXCUSES!"). But as for Taylor, that's as spot-on as I could render her, in all her horrible and infuriating ways. 

I don't really know where the story will go, exactly, or how far, but I had a fun bit of nostalgia in writing it, and hope to have some more. In the meantime, I hope it's at least some fun for you all, too. Be well, be safe, be amused! More to come.