Opening
Foreigner
By @dirge
“You can’t to do that,” she said in her broken English.
Her face was contorted in a rage, highlighting the wrinkles that came with late age. Lee Minkyung slammed the door behind her as she entered. “Other students. Yes. Say this is not equal. You can’t do that.”
Lee Minkyung pointed her finger towards the student in question, Park Dasol. The child’s lips still quivered in fear and anxiety, after having flunked her summoning test with a total and complete bomb.
“She failed. Yes.” Minkyung said. “Why you give her…another chance?”
Sarah Lopez folded her arms. Her excitement after first having met Minkyung deteriorated five minutes after their first class together, half a year back. Where Sarah’s style was calm, orderly and authoritative, Minkyung’s was hectic, erratic and authoritarian. The perfunctory policy of the Korean Magical Education Bureau regarding Korean instructors always shadowing foreign instructors in the classroom weighed on Sarah. It was Minkyung, and Minkyung only, that she butted heads with. Every day since then had been like brushing teeth with a razor blade.
This conflict, Sarah knew, was inevitable.
All other classes were perfect. Latin Summons accompanied with Bek Jinsoo, went smooth and the children brought out a myriad of lesser demons without error. History of Incantations with Lee Jaeyun was exciting, with students ready to participate, eager to learn the variations on Germanic blood rites and how these symbols shifted over time.
Sarah didn’t want to hate Minkyung. But damn if that bitch didn’t make it hard as hell not to.
So when Minkyung taunted Dasol in front of the class for failing to summon a basic familiar, that was the last straw.
Minkyung paced up to her and pulled Dasol’s breathing mask down, asking her why she was afraid to speak in front of the class. Dasol, large for her age, and in fact the largest girl in the school, stared down at her feet. Minkyung pulled the mask and let it snap back on Dasol’s face and at that, Sarah intervened.
She’d never interevened before. A foreigner wasn’t supposed to intervene in a Korean’s affairs. Especially an older woman’s affairs.
But Sarah did. And when the class ended, she brought Dasol along for an opportunity to summon the familiar with just the two of them in a side room meant for student studying.
Minkyung rambled on about how unfair it was. And Sarah finally broke.
“Shut up,” she said. “Stop talking and leave. Let me talk to Dasol. Let me help her, and that will be that.”
“Excuse me?” Minkyung bawked. Her neck shrunk back like a turkey and her splotchy makeup grew disheveled as the woman’s taught skin stretched over her face.
“Leave!” Sarah demanded.
Minkyung protested. Then they heard it.
“Hajima!!!” Dasol shouted in Korean. Sarah knew enough by this point to understand.
The student was shouting ‘stop’.
But she wasn’t talking to her teachers.
My 'Finish'
Stop!
The voices that often whispered when Dasol was trying to concentrate in class were no longer soft. Their imprecations and demands became unbearable as the quarreling between her teachers intensified.
These voices had tormented her since early childhood. Sometimes their troubling suggestions were accompanied by visions. She told her mother once, but this report was dismissed as childish fantasy.
Now the rants of her intruders could not be ignored. Their demands were clearer than they'd ever been.
Dasol pressed her hands to her ears.
"I cannot", she shrieked.
Her voice rose above the bickering teachers, above the roar of leaf blowers operating outside the open classroom windows.
The teachers froze. They regarded the child with alarm. Who was she addressing? No one was near. They were alone, the three of them, in that classroom. But she, Dasol, was not. It was the one thing she craved, to be alone. But the voices, the visions, would not leave her.
When she was very young, these had been gentle, a murmur that lulled her to sleep and greeted her in the morning. But as she matured, they became aggressive. They insisted that she act. But she did not want to.
The things they said!! Horrible. They did not merely suggest, but showed her how to carry out their vile deeds.
It was her teacher, Mikyung who elicited the strongest response from them.
"Take the scissors. She's not looking. So easy. It would be the end of her".
And Dasol could see the blood, because they showed her. She could see evil Mikyung on the floor, writhing. This is not what Dasol wanted. It is what the voices wanted. They shouted ever louder so that even her own screaming would not drown them out.
"Stop, I tell you. I will not. Leave me alone."
Of the three in the room only Sarah, the young foreign exchange teacher, guessed what might be transpiring. She had observed Dasol as a distracted, disoriented child. Sarah wondered if there was a history of pathology.
School records revealed an older sister stricken with schizophrenia at sixteen. The family history was one of the reasons Sarah had always been flexible with Dasol. Stress, she understood, could precipitate an episode from which the child might not recover.
The argument with Mikyung, that woman's harsh demands on Dasol, had triggered just such a crisis, Sarah feared.
Sarah turned her back on Mikyung, approached the child, and embraced her.
The screaming continued.
"Stop, Stop! I will not! No, I won't."
Dasol raised her empty hand in the air as though to throw an imaginary object to the floor.
"There. I cannot hurt anyone."
She wept.
Sarah turned toward Mikyung.
"Call for help. Now. We need a doctor. Urgently."
The older woman, for the first time in Sarah's memory, obeyed, and left the room.
Sirens drowned out the leaf blowers. Help for Dasol. Within moments medics were escorting Dasol to an uncertain future.
Sarah wondered if she would ever see the child again.
Postscript
I'm adding a postscript twelve hours after I posted this piece. My postscript is prompted by a comment from @bananfish (see below).
Perhaps I should explain my approach toward mental illness in the story. The mentally ill are not a population apart, or at least they shouldn't be, any more than those who suffer from rheumatoid arthritis, or cancer are apart. The mentally ill are not marked in a way that distinguishes them from everyone else. They are our children, our brothers and sisters. They are us.
And so my story shows a child who is afflicted, in a classroom. I weave her affliction into the plot not to trivialize her condition, but to create an understanding of how this illness creeps up on people. At first they may not understand (they almost certainly do not at first) what is causing the disruption in their lives. And those around them also often do not understand.
I do have personal experience, as I explain in my comment below. I've known children who were able to describe what was happening to them, or what had happened to them, when medication suppressed symptoms and they had been in therapy. These tools do help, but they don't cure.
Understanding is a relief. And, in a way, it is a sorrow. Because the child comes to realize that this is lifetime condition with which they must deal. One of the biggest burdens they face is the shame, and stigma, of their diagnosis.
I don't take mental illness lightly. I also do not treat it as a special category of disease. It would be better for all of us, for those who suffer from mental illness especially, if the mystique surrounding this disease disappeared.
I hope this postscript explains why I incorporate mental illness so seamlessly into my narrative.
This is my contribution to #finishthestory contest, sponsored by @bananafish. This week, the top portion--Foreigner--was written by @dirge.
We, those who choose to 'finish the story' interpret @dirge's beginning so that we can provide an appropriate conclusion. The bottom portion, Stop is how I chose to finish the story.
You can find the rules, and the story here. Check back next week. There's sure to be another challenge!