Heh.
Bullying plagued me throughout elementary school. I was always the different one, just different because I was the only one that didn't go to preschool with the rest of the kids. So I was an easy target.
Well, one day in the fourth grade, I believe it was sometime in September, I took my recorder (the flute-like instrument) out to the playground. I had always had a fear of open heights, and that day, I had tried to conquer it using the monkey bars.
The other kids were watching, of course, waiting for me to fail. And fail I did, falling flat on my face, literally. So while I lay there in the dirt, wood chips poking my eyes, the only sense I had were my ears, which were thankfully still above ground. What I did I hear, then? Laughing. All their laughter, all their amusement at my expense.
Something broke inside me that day. Real or imagined, I felt strength beginning to burn inside my stomach. My whole body tightened up as mental images of a small, beaten puppy growing into a vicious, rabid rottweiler filled my soul. My darkness had been unleashed, and with it...my musical "talent".
Slowly, I rose, the pipe in my mouth. I looked from one kid to the next, they were still laughing. So I swung at the nearest kid, dislocating his jaw with the force of the instrument alone. It was there that time seemed to freeze. For once, they were running from ME. Ran they did, as fast as their feet would take them. But like the many years I had suffered under their yolk, I never left their side.
As I gave chase, I looked around the playground. The other kids from various grades seemed to rush around the scene, attracted like a flood of magnets, a swarm of maggots. As I passed each kid, I played a note. "A", as I swung at one's neck. "B", as I stuck another's nose. Each seemed paralyzed, frozen in place, while my unstruck victims continued to run.
On and on it went, until I came across my most brutal aggressor. Joshua Hicks, I remember his name being. Oh, how long it seemed that I played that note, where I held all the holes and blew as hard as I could, exhaling as I chased him to the edge of the playground. I could feel it, retribution creeping up on me like a sweatdrop.
At last, his reckoning came. A swift hit into his teeth, a bash into his eyeballs, a golf swing right into his crotch...on and on the beating went, until at last the principal had to tear me away.
Made the Zionsville papers, it did. Forevermore, I was painted as a brutal barbarian, my aggression labeled "unwarranted". I was treated like a war criminal until at last I was pushed into being home schooled.
So here I am, after all these years, recounting a tale from the most beautifully dead of times.
Bullying?
They can pay the piper.
