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Teacher — Description

After thirteen letters to the principal, four speeches in front of the board of education, and two large protest banners erected across the street from school grounds, Mr. Esposito’s grievances with the Lawrenceville Elementary School curriculum continued to be ignored and unaddressed. Robert Esposito, a concerned father of two, had been on a personal crusade against his daughters’ primary school for their liberal perspectives on the Shrinking Pandemic and tiny people generally. Mr. Esposito considered himself a traditionalist, and he didn’t think that his daughter’s mind should be poisoned with “size egalitarian theory”. Fuming to himself while looking over a class syllabus, the middle-aged laborer gleaned an obvious ideological slant to his daughter’s class activities; singing songs about tiny people and their families, drawing pictures of tinies and “bigs” working together, and even mixing classes of regular children with tiny children in the same room for parts of the day. Robert wouldn’t stand idly by while such nonsense was being forced into his daughter’s head.

When he was a boy, tinies knew their place and the world was much simpler. But after the shrinking virus started shrinking full-sized people to the size of tiny people, society became soft and forgiving; a consequence of forgetting the laws of nature. The outraged father was adamant that society shouldn’t change simply because people started becoming tiny instead of being born tiny; after all, the basic reasons for treating tiny people differently have never changed and never will. In remembrance of this fact, Mr. Esposito often repeated an old saying to his daughters that went, “if tiny people were meant to be equal to big people, they would have been big people.”

However, the gods have a sense of humor and so they waited until Mr. Esposito’s parent-teacher meeting to punish his hubris and intolerance. As he was standing over his daughter’s second grade teacher, berating the petite young woman for a curriculum she had no control over and she didn’t even agree with, Mr. Esposito was suddenly struck with a rapid variant of the Shrinking Virus; his belligerent attitude and aggressive posture instantly evaporating into a pile of his own clothes.

Naked and confused, the now tiny father was rendered speechless as he looked skywards at the enormous woman towering above him before falling on his ass as the dizziness made manifest by her proportions overtook him. Unable to fully accept what just happened, the tiny man didn’t flinch as the full-sized teacher squatted down and plucked him between her manicured fingers by his fat little head. Grasping on to the giant’s index finger for dear life, the once traditionalist father suddenly found himself agreeing with the “size egalitarian” perspective; kicking his legs wildly and demanding to be put back down gently.

“Stop it, this instant! I have rights! You can’t do this to me!” the little man yelled with his barely audible high pitched voice.

The teacher just grinned at the panicked little man dangling at her eye level, soaking in the irony of it all. She had always considered herself a traditionalist who was secretly on Mr. Esposito’s side.

“Oh, I can’t do this to you?” she mused while carelessly twisting her wrist, shaking him like a dinner bell. “You gonna make me stop, little guy?” she asked, putting a fine point on his new place in the social pecking order. It’s like her grandmother always told her, “if tiny people were meant to be equal to big people, they would have been big people.”

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