Social Skills
an excerpt

People describe nightmares as having an "unreal" quality to them, but there was nothing unreal about the situation in the classroom as I returned. Instead, it was all too vivid, glaringly so, and too much my responsibility to find comfort in the thought that it all might be a dream. No, that was really my teaching assistant Tom, holding onto the ankle of Jim, with one arn disappearing out the window to grab another part of his body - his belt? - while everyone else was screaming and the fan, it's cord snaking over the sill, absent from its perch on the empty windowsill. No other trace of Jim was evident except for his wail as it welled up from the courtyard, echoing against the brickface amongst the unused benches and unadmired landscaping below.

I was over by the window in a second, but Tom had already hauled the boy back inside the window, his shock of brown hair standing straight up, a grin on his face and has hands clutching the fan as its blades made a haphazard rotation, still moving although the plug had been snatched from the socket a moment before this.

Tom looked at me with shock on his face, and asked, "Is this a referral, Mrs. A?"

Jim, returned to the floor, smoothed his shirt and sauntered back to the Lego table without a backward glance. I thought of the precariously balanced fan, the open window, the inability of anyone to control Jim's lightning-speed impulses, and by contrast, the ineffectuality of any disciplinary method to buy a pause in the child's mind, and shook my head.

"No, Tom. I don't think so." I said, shutting the window for the moment. All the other students erupted in a wave of "You're not allowed-" and "You're so stupid," while Jim turned to his legos with a mysterious smile on his flushed-pink face. "I had to save the fan," he stated practically, and refused to say any more on the matter.