Our real teacher always loved my stories, I said.
Yes, she said, but he’s taken a leave. Listen. Creative expression is a wonderful thing. But there are limits.
LuAnn smiled at me in a way that suggested it was repression that was a wonderful thing. What planet was LuAnn from? A place where painful memories would be obliterated and unruly children medicated into zombies. LuAnn was from Earth.
It isn’t OK to make your teachers or other students or social workers characters in your stories, she said. If you have sexual issues you’d like to address, you might do that more productively with a licensed therapist. In any case, Darlene thinks it would be more helpful if you wrote about your future career.
Does utter blackness exist? Utter blackness does exist, and sometimes I’d been there. I remembered it quite clearly. It was certainly more educational than that school, and I thought I’d like to visit it again.
The Last Hand Job by Jerome Caja