The Rattlesnake

AM TAKING A COURSE IN FLASH FICTION SO HERE IS A FLASH VERSION OF A RECENT POST!!

First meeting with the rattlesnake he damn near swallows me whole, or my contract anyway. It comes out regurgitated and way short of my mortgage repayments. I tell him to hiss off.

Then there is the itinerant in my class. Never brings a book to school. What’s to say? Where’s your book Mary Lou? By the side of the road. Me ma used it to swot flies. What book? Silas who? Never heard of him? No point in sending Mary Lou to the office for a new one. She’d skip class. Mary Lou exhibits behaviour peculiar to many teenagers and not unique to travellers but when the snake hauls me into his pit to accuse me of discrimination against a member of an ethnic minority group and political incorrectness to boot, I nearly jump down his jaws.

Give her another copy of Silas Marner to lose! Let her share and snigger and distract! Make an exception! If you bend the rules, I hiss back, you end up with holes in them. He drools spite and spittle all the way across the table, out the door and on top of my retreating figure at the foot of the stairs.

Then he starts hissing at my classroom door. On the hour. Tail coiled around a folder replete with excuses for being there.

Colleagues suggest Union intervention. I say lawyers are boa constrictors; they would swallow me whole.

Battle enters phase two. Drum rattling, skin shedding, tongue flicking. I shed pounds. I may eat my own tail soon but it’s a fight to the death.

Then I reconnoitre. Need a new paradigm, a planning construct that will allow me to deter and seize initiative. …….

Place large placard outside my classroom door.

Snakes out!

Recording in progress!

Enter at your peril!

Up Saint Patrick!