Twisted tales - страница 11

Maurice, a man whose tie perpetually battled a losing war against gravity, arrived at Public School 23 with the lofty title of “Science Instructor.” But Maurice's science was of a purely celestial, and rather internal, variety. While earnest young minds buzzed with questions about the pollination of peonies or the digestive tract of the earthworm, Maurice's gaze was fixed, utterly and completely, on the acoustic-tile heavens above.

His classroom, a theatre of the absurd, played out daily. Little Timmy would pipe up, “Mr. Henderson, what's photosynthesis?” And Maurice, eyes still lost in the labyrinthine patterns of the ceiling, would murmur, “Ah, photosynthesis… a delicate dance of photons, a silent symphony of chlorophyll… yes, quite.” The answer, a verbal Jackson Pollock, meant everything and nothing, leaving Timmy both impressed and utterly bewildered. The children quickly learnt that the key to surviving Maurice's class was to ask questions to which the answers did not matter.

Years marched on, doing their best to imitate a particularly brisk drill sergeant. The bright-eyed students of P.S. 23 scattered to the winds, armed with Maurice's vague pronouncements and a healthy dose of skepticism. Time, that relentless sculptor, chiseled away at Maurice, leaving him a frail, stooped figure, a shadow of his former, ceiling-gazing self.

One day, Maurice found himself in a predicament. Old age, that notorious trickster, had played a cruel joke, leaving him with an ailment as baffling as one of his own lectures. He needed help, and quickly. Desperate, he recalled the faces of those bygone students, faces he barely registered during his years of ceiling-gazing enlightenment. He remembered little Susie, who was always asking about the migration patterns of butterflies, and now he got a letter from his family saying she was one of the best doctors in the country. There was also young Pete, who wondered if the stars were actually streetlights. Apparently, he was now a famous astrophysicist.

Fortune, it seemed, had an ironic sense of humour. The very students who had suffered through his abstract lessons were now the pillars of the medical and scientific community. The doctor, the scientist, and even the pharmacist, all alumni of P.S. 23, gathered around Maurice's bedside. They spoke in terms he mostly had no clue about it, but they seemed to know what to do. And while their prescriptions and diagnoses were far more grounded than his old pronouncements on the “silent symphony of chlorophyll,” one thing became clear: even a life spent staring at the ceiling could, in its own peculiar way, cultivate a harvest of unexpected kindness and help. After all, even stars need a little help sometimes.