Tess said that the school never fulfilled its promise of teaching her how to walk on the tightrope. She said: I fall every time. Without fail. She said it also failed to teach her how to juggle, how to ride a unicycle, and how to spin plates. Don’t even get me started about magic tricks. He said, Not everyone has the proclivity. She said, Your school never even came close to teaching me what proclivity meant. He shrugged. True, he said, but we’re not that kind of school. Look, he said. At the Bowman School of Things You Always Wanted to Do, we put our heart into teaching you all the things you always wanted to do. But I can’t say we have one hundred percent success rate. What school does? Does another university make one hundred percent of the people interested in engineering into successful engineers? There is always the kid—many of them, really—who doesn’t love math and never will. But he wants to be an engineer anyway. Or maybe he’s been told he should be an engineer. She said, I don’t think it’s the same. She was sullen. Ms. Johnson, he said. Tess—may I call you Tess? Yes, she said. I think by now you can call me Tess. We’ve been married long enough. He nodded. Tess, what I’m trying to say is that maybe you should study to become a doctor. Or a lawyer. Maybe an engineer. I think those are honorable professions and I think you’d be good at them. She looked at him as if he had just licked the backside of a gecko. She said: You don’t know me at all, do you?
Jeffrey S. Chapman’s The Bowman School of Things You Always Wanted to Do appears in Flock 22.
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Tess said that the school never fulfilled its promise of teaching her how to walk on the tightrope. She said: I fall every time. Without fail. She said it also failed to teach her how to juggle, how to ride a unicycle, and how to spin plates. Don’t even get me started about magic tricks. He said, Not everyone has the proclivity. She said, Your school never even came close to teaching me what proclivity meant. He shrugged. True, he said, but we’re not that kind of school. Look, he said. At the Bowman School of Things You Always Wanted to Do, we put our heart into teaching you all the things you always wanted to do. But I can’t say we have one hundred percent success rate. What school does? Does another university make one hundred percent of the people interested in engineering into successful engineers? There is always the kid—many of them, really—who doesn’t love math and never will. But he wants to be an engineer anyway. Or maybe he’s been told he should be an engineer. She said, I don’t think it’s the same. She was sullen. Ms. Johnson, he said. Tess—may I call you Tess? Yes, she said. I think by now you can call me Tess. We’ve been married long enough. He nodded. Tess, what I’m trying to say is that maybe you should study to become a doctor. Or a lawyer. Maybe an engineer. I think those are honorable professions and I think you’d be good at them. She looked at him as if he had just licked the backside of a gecko. She said: You don’t know me at all, do you?
Jeffrey S. Chapman’s The Bowman School of Things You Always Wanted to Do appears in Flock 22.
Jeffrey S. Chapman is a fiction writer and he teaches creative writing at Oakland
University (near Detroit, MI). He is working on a graphic novel about the Roman poet Ovid and his short stories and comics have been published in numerous journals including Western Humanities Review, The Bellingham Review, Fiction International, and Black Warrior Review.