I looked out at the mass of bodies, all smiling at me and fixing me with a rigid expression.
Didn’t know what to think about them, really. All staring towards me. Some of them looked kind, but even with a smile a lot of them caused me anguish. Silly really. It’s not like any one of them is going to get up and hurt me. Why would they? How could they?
Feeling somewhat self-conscious (so preferable to feeling scared), I cleared my throat to address the bullies in the school group. There were only two or three, but that was enough to make life miserable.
“I want you to know what you’ve done. You’ve destroyed another human being. I can’t take it anymore.”
Silence.
Cold smiles made even colder by the lack of human warmth within the shell curling the lips. That’s what they seemed like to me: shells, rather than people. How could they be real people when they had no compassion, or humanity?
“I’m going to end it all now. I can’t live like this anymore.”
Silence.
What can you expect? My friends, such as they were, could never do anything about this. Some of them had suffered worse than I. Strange, really, that so few could bring fear to so many. Even though we had the advantage of numbers we didn’t have the instinct to gang up on another human being. That was our weakness; our downfall.
And after considering long and hard what I could do about this, I had decided the only thing to do was to end it all. Violently. Permanently.
There was no fear left. My decision was made and it was time to end things.
With a steady hand I took the lighter and applied it. The flame sputtered into life and took a few seconds to catch hold. For a brief moment I doubted what I was doing, but now it was too late and the flame was well underway, growing, taking on a life of its own.
“What are you doing, honey?”, my wife asked, as she came into the room.
“I’m burning that blasted school photo. It’s haunted me ever since it was taken. Too many memories of the school bullies.”
“Well, I’m glad you got rid of it at last. It’s been hanging on the wall bugging you for so long. You should have got rid of it ages ago. Look at the mess you’ve made!”
And with that simple act of vandalism I was free of the haunting memory of the schoolyard bullies who had made some of my schooldays so miserable. I had witnessed the funeral pyre of a life that no longer existed. I had risen, from the ashes, like the phoenix, as a new creation with a new job.
Being the new headmaster at my old school wouldn’t seem so bad now.
Note from author:
I wrote this with a fairly flippant ending in mind, but it was inspired by a news story recently of a tragedy in which a young boy who was bullied at school took his own life. He was only 12 years old. A terrible tragedy. But the story and the human tragedy of that were far to heavy to carry over into this short piece.
Bullying at school is a terrible thing and for those of us who didn’t really suffer it, it may be hard to understand just how bad it can be. Well, it’s at least bad enough for one young soul to have taken his life.
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