Flash! Fiction by Peter McMillan - HTML preview

30

The Talking Stick

My first teaching job was in an inner city school. It was pretty un-eventful until the day I introduced the talking stick.

It was a nice stick. It had some sort of animal hide wrapped tightly at either end and a single large white eagle feather fastened to a colourful array of beads halfway up. I had picked it up at a souvenir stand in New Mexico on a road trip back when I was in college.

I had completely forgotten about it until I got into ESL teaching.

Everybody I met taught the Native American talking stick. At first I thought it was just plain hokey. But students were fascinated by the back story, and the behavioural effects were said to be extraordinary. Best of all, it was foolproof to teach.

So, when I brought my old talking stick into class one bright winter morning, having refitted it with a beautiful Blue Jay feather from the park next door, I was filled with a surge of new teacher enthusiasm.

It was going swimmingly at first. We had a full class of 19 students, and it was very crowded but still cold, because the radiator heating in our old building couldn’t keep up with the cold air leaking in.

Simulating a council meeting, the students were discussing a hypo-thetical power plant project for our community, and it was about evenly split between supporters and opponents. The talking stick was regulating the debate. It was turning out just as I had imagined.

Then, one of the students tripped and fell over a desk and banged another student on the head with the talking stick. Blood trickled.

The hit student scrambled to her feet, grabbed the talking stick and swung it at what she thought was her attacker. That's the last I remember distinctly, because chairs and desks and books and 31

handbags and coats flew about the classroom for the longest three-and-a-half minutes I’ve ever seen.

When the principal and school security rushed into the classroom to restore order, three students lay tangled in the tumble of chair legs and desk tops and two were slumped over their desks. The talking stick lay broken and bloody on the floor at my feet, while the lovely blue feather with its black bar markings, having come loose during the debate, had settled unruffled onto one of the upright desks.

First published in Daily Flash 2011: 365 Days of Flash Fiction.