Backwards Narrative (draft)

...On which Mr. Maddox has made extensive comments now. So it will be improved.



I walked the direction my back was facing, and so were all the people in the hallway. There were people putting books in their lockers, people pulling books from their lockers. Occasionally, a sheet of paper or two would be vitalized on its own accord and fly into hands and binders of people. If someone was creepy enough to notice it, they would have seen the history handout in my hands iron itself out gradually but perfectly. A few snow flakes levitated and were sucked into the grey sky. No one was careful enough to stop and observe this extraordinary phenomenon. Instead, people were all walking backwards casually. Only they weren’t. No one ran into someone else. We are all much trained in walking backwards.

I kept walking. I didn’t have to turn around to see there was a staircase. It came naturally to me, although I did look down while I was walking (backwards) up the stairs.

Now, forgive my excessive usage of the word “backwards.”

But I did keep walking backwards and went into a classroom. It was brightly lit. As I walked in, I handed the just-copied warm handout back into Mr. Stanton’s hands. The handout, just by pure coincidence, happened to situate exactly on top of other handouts. Two sheets of stapled notebook paper flung themselves into my hands. I identified it to be the essay for the test I have not taken yet (maybe I have). I put it inside a stapler and pressed it. The stapler not only unstapled the essay and swallowed the staple, but also miraculously filled up the little holes on the paper. I walked in a few more steps, and the plastic recycling can tossed up a wrinkled ball of paper in the air. I caught it with probably the least amount of motion physically needed to catch a ball of paper. Paper indeed acquires the habit of ironing itself perfectly in my hands, and the ball was no exception. It unfolded and unwrinkled to reveal its true halfway-written paragraph identity.

Holding my essay and now flat paragraph, I went to my seat in the corner. I made a few awkward, unnecessary motions to unsettle the backpack from my shoulders. I dropped it on the floor in a way that probably hurt my backbones. I sat down, pulled out a pen, and started un-scribbling the essay portion of the test that was in my hands. By un-scribbling, I refer to the curious capability of my pen to suck up the ink already smeared into the paper.

When I was almost done whiting out the first page of the essay, I started giggling for no reason, and so did half dozen others in the room. I was grasped by a strong, subconscious desire to take a look at Christine, my eccentric classmate. Half the class started to laugh out loud, and so did I. I turned to Christine’s direction. Oh, indeed! She was typing on a typewriter. A big old typewriter with a bell and the platform and everything. How she managed to fit that inside her bookbag I don’t know. It should have weighed good ten pounds. The whole class started laughing out loud. The laughter got louder and maniac. Then it was suddenly silent.

Ding.

Christine’s typewriter announced the end of a line, rather loudly. The class started laughing again. Christine didn’t even seem to care. She kept un-typing her essay with a very straight face. We were still all laughing maniacally. Someone said something out loud incomprehensibly. Then we all went silent, forgot about Christine’s typewriter, and worried about the test.

When the bell rang, the now perfectly blank notebook paper attached itself to the notebook, which I shoved inside my bookbag. With another awkward motion, I threw it around my shoulders and walked outside the classroom, backwards.