“That’s,” Mrs Lupin said in her soothing tone, “the end.”
Five faces of varying comprehension looked up from their slender copies of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, rewritten for the under fifteens. One kid was interested, two were indifferent, another was confused, and the last was… well…
This classroom was nick-named the Retard Ward, or Spaz Town by the normal kids, and to be sure, some pupils were hopeless. Jake Mears, for instance. Fourteen years old but already in trouble with the police for hot-wiring a motorbike.
Other kids were struggling with Asperger’s or dyslexia, and a few were… not that bright. They’d probably slide through the school system to start work at the local firestone factory because who else would take them?
“That was horrible!” came the familiar scream.
Here we go, thought Mrs Lupin.
Blonde, freckled and nasally voiced, Matthew May had been in therapy most of his short life, possessing two emotions: silent sulking which had him sitting moodily in the corner, and rage, which meant he’d scream his disdain at the top of his lungs.
“It makes no sense,” he spat. “Why did he magically transform into a giant beetle? Was it a witch’s hex, voodoo magic, a gypsy’s curse? We’ll never know, it’s never explained!”
He held up the copy of his book, which displayed a photo of Kafka on the back of its laminated cover. Matthew glared at this picture, as if the writer had taken a shit on his bedroom floor.
“Hey moron,” he yelled “don’t you know that it’s literally impossible for insects to grow that big! Gregor would have suffocated immediately because he had no lungs, and oh yeah, guess what?! He wouldn’t have been able to move his exoskeleton either!”
Here Matthew began slamming his fists down on the table, causing the others to flinch. People in the next room could probably hear him, too.
“How can anyone like this story?” he frothed. “The family is stupid! They don’t ask why their son transformed into a big beetle. They don’t call in the scientists! Hell, they don’t put him in a freak circus and make some money out of him! Plus, they’re jerks! The father’s a lazy sod, the mother’s hysterical, the daughter’s rotten too. Why did Kafka waste his time writing about such an unpleasant family?”
Mrs Lupin wanted to take her big black marker and write across Matthew’s chest: “Just because you can’t understand something, doesn’t mean it’s bad.” She could have asked him to look up metaphor or analogy in the dictionary, too.
She didn’t do that however, she forced her sweet smile, usually reserved for toddlers and the rather dim.
“That’s very interesting, Matthew,” she replied soothingly. “Now, Jake, what did you think of it?”
Jake, bored and unable to say much, merely muttered, “It was alright, yeah.”
