The Pen

 Challenge - Photo Prompt - No Word Limit

The Pen

They say that the pen is mightier than the sword and what happened in the classroom today was certainly not how I’d interpreted the phrase.

This week we switched to fountain pens in our history lesson. Not the nice modern ones with ink cartridges, these were the old fashioned ones that you have to constantly dip into a small pot of black ink.

“What next?” We cried. Deportment lessons with books balanced on our heads or bringing back the dunces hat if you get a question wrong?

I had problems with the pen, my handwriting was never the best and the scratchy nib did nothing to improve it but I got by

Dave on the next desk to me wasn’t so lucky, you see he’s left handed and south paws (an obscure boxing term) have a tendency to push the pen across the page rather than pull it like us regular folk.

The upshot of this technique is that the slow drying ink ends up smeared across the paper and all over poor Dave’s hand.

As Dave got more and more frustrated I saw Mr Miller, our history teacher, making his way over to see how Dave and I were getting on.

“What on earth is this mess boy?” screeched our outraged teacher. “It looks like you’ve been making potato prints.”

“It’s not my fault Sir” sobbed Dave as he managed to transfer a quantity of ink to his face “I’m left handed”

“Nonsense boy, start again and keep going until you get it right.”

At this point something in Dave snapped and clutching the offensive pen in his ink stained left hand he plunged it into Mr Miller’s right eye socket. Sir collapsed and we watched as his brain leaked out onto the classroom floor.