Monica liked playing with marbles. Not in the normal sense but she liked to use her slingshot and fire marbles at different objects. Usually a person’s window who she felt may have slighted her. When she was sixteen she was given a zero grade for one of her examinations, ironically called The Art of Comedy. Rather than seeing it as being funny. Monica vowed to get retribution for the slight she felt. She didn’t know where her examiners lived but she didn’t need to. She knew exactly where the examination hall was where she sat her exam.
One week after failing her exam Monica got a bus into town bought a hundred marbles and made up her mind that the following Saturday when the school was closed she was going to break every window in the examination hall. She spent Thursday and Friday in the local woods practicing her aim, using stones she picked up from the ground rather than waste what she called ammo – her marbles.
When Saturday arrived she cycled down to the school, locked her bike in the car park that was designated for teachers and took her rucksack full of marbles off her back and walked straight towards the examination hall. She circled the hall twice to make sure that there was nobody around and then started firing away at the windows.
At first the sound of the breaking glass made Monica nervous. It was loud and she feared that others might hear the crashing sound. However after the first ten windows were broken she grew more confident and moved slowly along the hall breaking each window she came across. After breaking forty windows she stopped to look at the damage she had caused. Though to Monica it wasn’t damage it was justice being served.
How strongly Monica felt was even more noticeable when she walked around to the other side of the hall and began breaking even more windows. Though on this occasion her aim was more precise as the windows were smaller. When her phone rang she ignored it. She had more important things to be doing.
When she finally reached the front of the examination hall there were three small oval shaped windows above the door. Rather than standing any distance away from the windows Monica took the last of her marbles from her rucksack and stood just feet away from each window and fired the last of her marbles through the windows.
She then sat down by the door, took her examination paper out of her rucksack and sat down to read it again. No matter how hard she tried she couldn’t see why the paper had been given a zero grade. She couldn’t understand how those who had graded the paper didn’t see what she had written as being funny. That she was being ridiculous and ironic. The only thing that Monica could think was that those who graded the paper had taken what she had written personally. Rather than it being Monica who was being examined it was Monica who was examining the examiner.
She put the exam paper back into her rucksack and walked towards the car park to collect her bike. And instead of looking back at the damage she had caused. Monica just thought how funny it was that she had managed to successfully criticize her teachers, even if they didn’t like it.
