Paper Flowers in the Sixth Grade

I was reading (it was free time) and
it was likely something from the
Scholastic Book Club, Leave It to
Beaver: The Novel or Triple Trouble
for Rupert or some other weighty
literary masterpiece, when I heard
a commotion in the back of the
room, an explosion of colored
tissues and half-finished paper
flowers as if a volcano had erupted
in a rainbow of paper and tears.

William, tall and skinny and the object
of much bullying from some of the boys
and a few girls because he was tall and
skinny and displayed a tendency to
drama or melodrama or hysterics or
a combination of all three
(something boys didn’t do in sixth grade)
(something boys didn’t do in any grade),
had been sitting with some of the girls,
chatting like they usually did and
making elaborate paper flowers,

a kind of 11-year-old echo or sign of
knitting and crocheting to come, when
someone, a boy or girl or even the teacher
said something admonishing or mean or
obvious and William flared in outrage and
sobs, jumping up in a combustion of colors
as tissue papers flew from his lap. We all
rushed to the windows, like watching a
movie at the Saturday matinee, one of
those awful things like Jason and Argonauts
from the original Italian dubbed in English

(we loved those movies) because this had
happened before, to watch William run
across the street, a large paper flower still
in his hand and three yellow tissues still in
the pocket of his jeans, to his house two
blocks away. Perhaps the color of the
tissues had run together with smeared
tears but we never saw William in class
again; we never saw William again, as if
a tornado of paper flowers had carried
him away, perhaps to land on the witch.

Nearly half a century later I walked
by that corner where William had
lived and all that was there was
a concrete slab, broken in pieces.
Like William, the house had vanished,
most possibly in a mass of elaborate
paper flowers swept away by
a cruel wind. I stopped and stared
at the slab, smaller than it should have
for a house, and wondered if William
still held that paper flower in his hand.

To read other poems submitted for One Shot Wednesday, please visit the One Stop Poetry blog.

Photograph: Paper Flower by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.