Puzzled
Secondhand Writing Prompts (2/30)
’Just Write, Right’ emerged quietly, but spoken aloud, as a personal project that admitted openly - but not necessarily confidently - that I had stories to tell. Finding the words to create imagined tales gives me pleasure. I am not one of those that Hemingway would suggest should ‘sit down at a typewriter and bleed’. When the words (and ideas) flow, I have had plenty to say over the 3 years of the project. Recently, I have not sent the metaphorical bucket into the well so I have no idea if it is baked dry or replenished by a fallow winter.
To mark the third anniversary of my creative writing project, I am going to revisit previously-used prompts and story titles to see if something fresh emerges. The aim? Thirty stories in the month of May. Often-used words placed in an original order; created, proofed and published by a human who just loves the art of storytelling.
Puzzled
Cambridge, 1965
The nervous chatter of fellow students did little to puncture the claustrophobic atmosphere of learnedness. Heavily-whiskered history realised in muted oils gazed sternly upon the assembly, impossibly-demanding standards framed for posterity, implacable authority ever watchful for character flaws or inattention.
The young man was aware that it was not just the colour of his cheap suit that set him apart. His threadbare hand-me-down trousers were at least as old as he was. They added sheen to the already glistening oak bench each time he shifted nervously in his seat. Everything made him conscious of his differences. The Porter had looked him up and down before guiding him to this daunting lecture hall where he was surrounded by the elite students who shuffled into every tiered bench except the one he occupied. He felt isolated, out of place.
Their tutor swept in, billowing black robes suggesting levitation in defiance of the laws of physics. His expression, mirroring those portraited predecessors, offered not one gram of levity, not a kelvin of warmth. His worn briefcase silenced the room as leather thwacked onto the lecterns walnut veneer.
“We will begin with Newton”, he boomed, “and let me assure you that no ‘apple for teacher’ will assist with an improvement to your grades. Only hard work will offer such rewards. That is the minimum this Establishment expects and I demand.”
A worn stub of chalk gripped tightly in claw-like fingers scratched across a board more grey than black, the piercing shriek of it sending shivers down one hundred and one spines.
‘Professor Hargreaves’.
The young man in the threadbare trousers furrowed his brow at the unfamiliar-sounding name. He had always been the first in his school class to query, the sole hand that snaked skywards. But now an uncertainty stilled such a gesture, anxiousness that pressed sweaty palms flat on trembling thighs. Who wanted to ask first? Who would want to stand out more than they already did?
A formula emerged from a series of scratches, exaggerated lines punctuated by audible dots, like mathematical morse; to him, an indecipherable code. It felt beyond complex to his brain, with no narrative to follow and the storyline masked by unfamiliar, impenetrable language. Numbers partnered with letters - chalk and cheese - chalked opposites inducing incomprehension, decimal points adding confusion to the power of ten.
The deferential ‘Sir’ stuck in his throat, his voice as crippled by nerves as his limbs.
“Physics, young learners, is logic,” the professor bellowed, each word punctuated with a stabbing motion, a stubby index finger prodding the text books piled haphazardly in front of him. “Follow the well-established Laws and we shall get along just fine”. His piercing gaze scanned the theatre. To the young man in the fifth row, it felt as though the cold grey eyes lingered on him, a flicker of something unspoken … the student reached into his love of language for a word … yes, disdain, he thought the professor looked at him dismissively.
“There is no room in this Physics class for novelty or modern thinking. I trust we understand one another.”
Had the Professor looked up at the student body for even one single moment in the ensuing hour and a half, he would have been faced with the crowns of one hundred heads. Most of those bright young things had felt the hand of good fortune on their shoulders, gifted a privileged foundation upon which their learning in this room would be built. Undoubtedly, the Professor’s whiskers would have twitched if his gaze had rested on the one blank face staring forward, an isolated figure with no fellow student to nudge him into note-taking.
But it was a black-robed back, noticeably hunched as if unequal to the forces applied to it, that offered itself to this freshman year.
A clatter of footsteps echoed outside in the quadrangle, and a bell chimed as a well-honed, perfectly timed lesson concluded.
“DISMISSED”.
The young man watched the benches clear in front of him, and heard those behind empty while he gathered his thoughts. The command he sent from brain to feet barely had time to compute before a booming imperative pulled him up short.
“You, boy, stay”.
The wrinkled red face that stared down at him was impossibly hirsute, grey bristles poking from ear and nostril, enormous bushes above the eyes creating a single broad thicket. To a young man who barely scraped a razor across his soaped face once a week, it was a troubling sight. It was more important, he felt, to avert his gaze than to appear polite.
“It seems to me, young man, that you don’t belong here. I have no notion who thought it would be a good idea to have you join my class, but it will NOT happen again.”
He had no words to offer. Tongue-tied was what he would have written had he been describing the scene in his diary, or an essay, but this was a lecture room where nothing - to his eye - added up. The young man knew he must be about to be exposed. Was the scholarship an elaborate joke? Guide the new boy to the wrong lecture, let Old Hargreaves deal with him.
“So_so_sorry, Sir … I shouldn’t, sorry … I’m … it won’t happen again …”.
“It most certainly will not,” a gravel-toned voice boomed from deep in the undergrowth of an overhanging moustache.
“Let’s get you along to Professor Forsyth, shall we? I have a feeling that you are more Arts than Science. The History Department is expecting very great things from you, Mr Rushdie. I have no doubt they shall extract some words from you.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Born into an affluent Muslim family in India, Rushdie began his education in 1954 at Bombay’s Cathedral School. His family sent him to Rugby, one of England’s finest boys’ schools, when he was thirteen. In 1964, his family moved to Karachi, Pakistan, where Rushdie spent his school vacations. From 1965 to 1968, he attended King’s College at Cambridge University, where he read history with an emphasis on Islamic religion and culture.
Two years ago - 28 April 2024 - I was writing mostly 100-word stories to prompts offered by Miguel S. | The Fiction Dealer and other flash fiction writers. It was a way of stirring ideas and allowing words to flow; the word-count constraint noticeably sharpened my editing skills and resulted in tighter drafts.
This, back then, was a wholly different take on the prompt:
Puzzled
Claustrophobic hush.
Once he started, she understood how to play it. He demanded complete silence as soon as she’d cleared supper. Not the whisper of a novel’s page unlocking its secrets, nor the hiss of embroidery thread personalising the handkerchiefs he hawked into. She sat upright, back stiffened by the high-backed chair, while he hunched over his obsession. Her mind wandered, drifting to fantasies where she was the obsession. That was not this world. His attentions fragmented into a thousand pieces, slowly reassembled.
The jigsaw piece she’d hidden pressed against bare flesh. This was another puzzle he wouldn’t work out.
