Halloween story: Cynthia
Note: "Cynthia" is an original short, spooky story. All characters were crafted entirely from imagination. Please respect the work of this author and do not copy.
An annoying noise distracted him from the equation before his nose - a repetitive thudding that drummed into his brain and disrupted concentration.
He turned and eyed the source, a small child sitting in a chair far too big for her. She swung her feet back and forth as far as her knees could take them, which rapped the heels of her shoes on the underside of the seat with irritating regularity.
She didn’t offer a comment, just stared up at him with emotionless eyes set in the typically large skull of her age range. He wondered if he could solve this problem were his brain as proportionally sized, then posed a question to her.
“Do you like math?”
She thought about that - he could almost see the wheels turning behind those large brown irises - but she offered no comment. Instead small muscles and bones twitched; producing an inelegant shoulder shrug even as her foot beats continued.
He shot a glance at the digital display on his wrist to read the time and the elevated spike in his pulse rate. Only ten minutes into the situation and she was proving his theory about why he should not associate with children.
“Your mommy will be back shortly,” he offered. “Want some paper and a pencil to draw with?”
The child, Cynthia, he recalled, nodded and the leg swinging stopped.
He swiveled the chair around so she was situated properly at his desk, then he plied her with clean sheets of paper and every colored pen and pencil he had on hand to grade with.
“There, have at it.”
Only she couldn’t because she was too short to reach the desktop. This was solved with a stack of books on mathematics, books he prized and cringed over to put to such purpose. He eyed the precarious perch and sighed.
“You must keep your legs still, okay?”
She nodded and set to work.
By the time the bell indicated his free period was over, and so was his inopportune babysitting stint, he had managed to delve farther into the problem yet still hadn’t solved it. He took a picture of his work with his phone and began wiping the white board clean.
“Did you finish your drawing?” he asked as he finished scrubbing away his efforts. “You can take it with you.”
He turned and smiled, but his expression faltered when she held up a paper presenting her efforts. At first it appeared to be scribbles any child would do but, to his eyes, something else was revealed. She had taken the mathematic symbols he lovingly coerced into solutions and twisted them into a horrible creature bathed in red ink.
A shock of unease traveled through him and lowered his eyebrows into a frown. He glanced at her innocent face, devoid of malice, and hoped her mother would come in any second to rescue him.
“Are you going to be an artist someday?” he croaked.
Hurried footsteps of hundreds of children thundered outside in the halls but he only had ears for her startling reply.
“No. I’m going to rule the world.”
-*-
Three years had passed and the child’s words and drawing still haunted him, waking him with pounding heartbeats some mornings. Her mother, the chemistry teacher in the school, still pawned Cynthia off at odd times when daycare or school was unavailable. No other teachers felt as he did about the child. He knew this because he had discretely asked.
Cynthia was only odd with him - and it was his turn to babysit again.
She currently occupied one of the student desks in his empty room, diligently doing her first grade homework while her mother, safely entrenched her own classroom, taught her final class of the day.
He graded the quizzes before him, cringing every time he made a mark with the red pen in his hand, though it had nothing to do with his students’ efforts. When he glanced up, she was hard at work. When he attended to his papers, he felt those dark brown eyes bore through him.
“I’m done. May I draw on your board?”
Her voice was pleasant, so even though instinct said no, his mouth stated otherwise. Now she was behind him. Each time he heard the squeak of a marker on the clean white surface his nerves twitched.
Chiding himself, he focused on task and lost himself in the beauty of some well-crafted equations. At some point, the final bell rang and students escaped the building in a wake of joyful noise that bolstered his spirits and reminded him the weekend had begun. As he recalculated grades for his pupils and dutifully logged the results with his keyboard, he felt a sense of satisfaction.
A knock on the door elicited his invitation to enter and he glanced up to see the chemistry teacher beaming at him.
“Time to go!” She cocked her head and nodded at something behind him. “Still doing sideline research work, I see.”
Was she talking to her daughter? He swiveled his head, gawked at the board, then shot a glance around to find the other person in the room.
Cynthia was seated at the student desk, quietly packing her things.
He quickly faced his colleague as if to explain the situation, but nothing came out.
She shook her head, obviously impressed. “I don’t know how you find the time. Or why you still teach high school math.” A hand stretched toward her child and her tone rose in volume and pitch. “Come, Cynthia!”
“Okay, Mommy.”
As Cynthia slid off the seat and hoisted her small backpack on her shoulders, her mother expressed gratitude yet again for the babysitting chore. He sat there dumbly and stared at the girl while she navigated the desk rows to end up at her mother’s side.
They clasped hands and the mother headed off, but Cynthia made an effort to glance back and wave free fingers his way before disappearing through the doorway.
“Bye.”
When the building had quieted and he gathered his wits about him once more, he twisted his chair toward the board so he could study it with keener eyes. The equation on it was considerable and familiar, and written at just the right height had he produced it while seated, but he hadn’t, even though it appeared in his own hand.
He dragged the phone out of his pocket and swiped through its files, back to the first day Cynthia had visited him. Sure enough, the old pic showed the same equation, symbol for symbol and number for number.
No, there was one change. At the end, where he hadn’t finished, she had added a smiley face - a spot of humor done in red to catch his attention. His imagination twisted the happy cartoon into a wicked bloody grin as it dawned on him that Cynthia was paying a great deal of attention to what he did.
He shook his head, swiped a hand across his clammy brow and snapped a shot of her work before rising to attack it with an eraser.
It could be the child had a photographic memory. It could be the child had perfect recall. It could be the child viewed what he did as artistic scribbles and nothing more. There were so many explanations, he reasoned as he finished the cleansing with one final stroke to settle his churning stomach.
Even so, babysitting must cease immediately.
-*-
He resumed sideline work eventually, not because Cynthia was long absent from his doorway, but because he enjoyed it and it helped supplement the meager pay of a high school teacher. He kept teaching because it filled his heart with joy to see that spark in students when understanding, and perhaps love of math, blossomed in their eyes.
There were limits to his efforts, though. High school was as far down the age ladder as he could safely go. His imagination could assist in believing high schoolers were simply untrained adults in the making.
Smaller children perturbed him, which was why he shivered violently when Cynthia showed up again at his classroom door, clasping her mother’s hand and clutching a book on mathematics.
“No babysitting, no babysitting,” he stammered out, fully aware his insecurities had reduced his speech to a pitiful plea.
“Oh, it’s nothing like that,” Cynthia’s mother cheerfully assured him. “She needs a tutor.”
Thus hell began as he took 30 minutes out of his weekdays to guide Cynthia through her homework in exchange for meals made for him by her mother.
In time he acclimated to the arrangement. The meals were a change of pace from frozen fare, or hours of inadvertent fasting when he forgot to consume anything, and Cynthia exhibited none of her earlier perniciousness. She actually seemed to need his assistance with the rudimentary calculations she faced as a fifth grader.
But the tiny shiver that wracked his body each time she stepped into his classroom reminded him to be on his guard.
He was careful to not use the white board for anything except his classwork or her homework; hiding any advanced calculations from her sight in a notebook securely locked in a drawer while she was present. Over time, he stopped bringing that notebook to school, preferring to keep it safely at home.
When the semester ended, he breathed a sigh of relief and enjoyed the break. When classes resumed in the spring and no one knocked on his door, he returned to old habits and forged stunning answers to complex problems during his off hours. Two weeks in, on a day in which he was particularly pleased with his efforts, a small cough caused him to whirl in surprise.
Cynthia sat at the desk she normally occupied for her tutoring. He shot a glance at the closed door, certain he had not heard it open or shut to announce a visitor. Had there been a warning shiver and he missed it?
Her face spoke volumes. The gleam in her eyes, the triumph of her smile and the flush of her cheeks could have been the cheeriness of a normal child. To him, it said she was impressed with what he was fully capable of when unleashed, and he inwardly cringed.
“Mom said I need more tutoring. Hope you don’t mind.”
-*-
Years passed and he decided to retire from teaching. It was hard on his nerves and heart nowadays, always wondering if these new students would learn or harass, earn the grades they wanted or bully his compliance just to get them out of his room. In vain, he searched their eyes when they glanced up from hidden smart phones to see what he taught, but the bright moments were fewer and further apart, leaving him tired and depressed.
As he neatly packed the last remaining personal possessions in his room, the ones he left for the end that could easily be taken home on this last day of school, he felt a familiar shiver and addressed it with his attention.
Cynthia stood in the doorway, two bottles of water in hand.
“Mom said you were leaving. I came by to offer you a drink and my thanks.” She nodded. “I made it. I got my degree.”
She had graduated college; her mother had proudly announced this weeks ago to everyone who would listen. He couldn’t remember what her degree entailed but her mother had been proud of that, too. Cynthia was normal now: quiet, respectful and of adult size. The shiver was the last remaining vestige of creepiness, a habit formed when she was small and scary. It was time to tuck his imagined fears away.
She had needed him. He had tutored her. Truth be told, she was a welcome sight, for she could be counted as one of the successes who came back and let him know he had done his job well.
Cynthia stepped forward and offered him a bottle when he beckoned her in. They cracked open the plastic caps and touched the containers together.
“What are we toasting?” he asked.
“The future, may it always be bright.” She smiled kindly, enough that he felt encouraged to followed suit when she took a drink.
He had forgotten lunch and possibly even breakfast, though never coffee, so the cool liquid sliding down his throat was a welcome relief to his thirst.
“To the future,” he echoed faintly. A hard knot formed in the pit of his stomach. The room felt hot and crowded. A flush tightened his cheek and a spike of adrenaline increased his heart rate. He attributed this state to his anxiety over the future. How long would he be needed in the world? What would he do now?
“I started my own company,” Cynthia offered. She took another sip and he courteously did the same. “I’m a consultant.”
Consulting. He nodded as if confirming her choice of professions, but really he was verifying his own. He could continue his consulting and all would be well.
His stomach relaxed and his head cooled. He entered into a pensive state as he revisited Cynthia’s presence and what her mother had said. Cynthia had majored in chemistry - no biochemistry, he corrected. She graduated with honors. He could see her as a consultant.
He licked his lips and drank again. The water had a delicious aftertaste: earthy - no fruity. His body felt calmer, almost chilled, as did his spirit.
“I still have so much to learn.” Those dark brown eyes sought his paler ones. “You can help me.”
She needed to learn more? A slow, pulsing wave of icy focus seeped through him, settling his thoughts to a slower, more suggestive pace. It was a joy to awaken understanding in others. Perhaps he could help her.
“Finish that and come work for me.”
He nodded and complied.
On his way out, cardboard box in hand, he paused for one last look. The white board gleamed back at him, empty and ready for the next instructor. He blinked at it fondly, recalling the way Cynthia had used it to capture his imagination with a charming bit of artistry.
In fact, he thought as he sought out her smile and watched her hand gently touch his elbow to guide him away, her lipstick was the same brilliant color as that cute little smiley face she had drawn for him years ago.
He barely felt the shiver when he crossed the threshold toward his new life.
-*-
An annoying noise distracted him from the equation before his nose - a repetitive thudding that drummed into his brain and disrupted concentration.
He turned and eyed the source, a small child sitting in a chair far too big for her. She swung her feet back and forth as far as her knees could take them, which rapped the heels of her shoes on the underside of the seat with irritating regularity.
She didn’t offer a comment, just stared up at him with emotionless eyes set in the typically large skull of her age range. He wondered if he could solve this problem were his brain as proportionally sized, then posed a question to her.
“Do you like math?”
She thought about that - he could almost see the wheels turning behind those large brown irises - but she offered no comment. Instead small muscles and bones twitched; producing an inelegant shoulder shrug even as her foot beats continued.
He shot a glance at the digital display on his wrist to read the time and the elevated spike in his pulse rate. Only ten minutes into the situation and she was proving his theory about why he should not associate with children.
“Your mommy will be back shortly,” he offered. “Want some paper and a pencil to draw with?”
The child, Cynthia, he recalled, nodded and the leg swinging stopped.
He swiveled the chair around so she was situated properly at his desk, then he plied her with clean sheets of paper and every colored pen and pencil he had on hand to grade with.
“There, have at it.”
Only she couldn’t because she was too short to reach the desktop. This was solved with a stack of books on mathematics, books he prized and cringed over to put to such purpose. He eyed the precarious perch and sighed.
“You must keep your legs still, okay?”
She nodded and set to work.
By the time the bell indicated his free period was over, and so was his inopportune babysitting stint, he had managed to delve farther into the problem yet still hadn’t solved it. He took a picture of his work with his phone and began wiping the white board clean.
“Did you finish your drawing?” he asked as he finished scrubbing away his efforts. “You can take it with you.”
He turned and smiled, but his expression faltered when she held up a paper presenting her efforts. At first it appeared to be scribbles any child would do but, to his eyes, something else was revealed. She had taken the mathematic symbols he lovingly coerced into solutions and twisted them into a horrible creature bathed in red ink.
A shock of unease traveled through him and lowered his eyebrows into a frown. He glanced at her innocent face, devoid of malice, and hoped her mother would come in any second to rescue him.
“Are you going to be an artist someday?” he croaked.
Hurried footsteps of hundreds of children thundered outside in the halls but he only had ears for her startling reply.
“No. I’m going to rule the world.”
-*-
Three years had passed and the child’s words and drawing still haunted him, waking him with pounding heartbeats some mornings. Her mother, the chemistry teacher in the school, still pawned Cynthia off at odd times when daycare or school was unavailable. No other teachers felt as he did about the child. He knew this because he had discretely asked.
Cynthia was only odd with him - and it was his turn to babysit again.
She currently occupied one of the student desks in his empty room, diligently doing her first grade homework while her mother, safely entrenched her own classroom, taught her final class of the day.
He graded the quizzes before him, cringing every time he made a mark with the red pen in his hand, though it had nothing to do with his students’ efforts. When he glanced up, she was hard at work. When he attended to his papers, he felt those dark brown eyes bore through him.
“I’m done. May I draw on your board?”
Her voice was pleasant, so even though instinct said no, his mouth stated otherwise. Now she was behind him. Each time he heard the squeak of a marker on the clean white surface his nerves twitched.
Chiding himself, he focused on task and lost himself in the beauty of some well-crafted equations. At some point, the final bell rang and students escaped the building in a wake of joyful noise that bolstered his spirits and reminded him the weekend had begun. As he recalculated grades for his pupils and dutifully logged the results with his keyboard, he felt a sense of satisfaction.
A knock on the door elicited his invitation to enter and he glanced up to see the chemistry teacher beaming at him.
“Time to go!” She cocked her head and nodded at something behind him. “Still doing sideline research work, I see.”
Was she talking to her daughter? He swiveled his head, gawked at the board, then shot a glance around to find the other person in the room.
Cynthia was seated at the student desk, quietly packing her things.
He quickly faced his colleague as if to explain the situation, but nothing came out.
She shook her head, obviously impressed. “I don’t know how you find the time. Or why you still teach high school math.” A hand stretched toward her child and her tone rose in volume and pitch. “Come, Cynthia!”
“Okay, Mommy.”
As Cynthia slid off the seat and hoisted her small backpack on her shoulders, her mother expressed gratitude yet again for the babysitting chore. He sat there dumbly and stared at the girl while she navigated the desk rows to end up at her mother’s side.
They clasped hands and the mother headed off, but Cynthia made an effort to glance back and wave free fingers his way before disappearing through the doorway.
“Bye.”
When the building had quieted and he gathered his wits about him once more, he twisted his chair toward the board so he could study it with keener eyes. The equation on it was considerable and familiar, and written at just the right height had he produced it while seated, but he hadn’t, even though it appeared in his own hand.
He dragged the phone out of his pocket and swiped through its files, back to the first day Cynthia had visited him. Sure enough, the old pic showed the same equation, symbol for symbol and number for number.
No, there was one change. At the end, where he hadn’t finished, she had added a smiley face - a spot of humor done in red to catch his attention. His imagination twisted the happy cartoon into a wicked bloody grin as it dawned on him that Cynthia was paying a great deal of attention to what he did.
He shook his head, swiped a hand across his clammy brow and snapped a shot of her work before rising to attack it with an eraser.
It could be the child had a photographic memory. It could be the child had perfect recall. It could be the child viewed what he did as artistic scribbles and nothing more. There were so many explanations, he reasoned as he finished the cleansing with one final stroke to settle his churning stomach.
Even so, babysitting must cease immediately.
-*-
He resumed sideline work eventually, not because Cynthia was long absent from his doorway, but because he enjoyed it and it helped supplement the meager pay of a high school teacher. He kept teaching because it filled his heart with joy to see that spark in students when understanding, and perhaps love of math, blossomed in their eyes.
There were limits to his efforts, though. High school was as far down the age ladder as he could safely go. His imagination could assist in believing high schoolers were simply untrained adults in the making.
Smaller children perturbed him, which was why he shivered violently when Cynthia showed up again at his classroom door, clasping her mother’s hand and clutching a book on mathematics.
“No babysitting, no babysitting,” he stammered out, fully aware his insecurities had reduced his speech to a pitiful plea.
“Oh, it’s nothing like that,” Cynthia’s mother cheerfully assured him. “She needs a tutor.”
Thus hell began as he took 30 minutes out of his weekdays to guide Cynthia through her homework in exchange for meals made for him by her mother.
In time he acclimated to the arrangement. The meals were a change of pace from frozen fare, or hours of inadvertent fasting when he forgot to consume anything, and Cynthia exhibited none of her earlier perniciousness. She actually seemed to need his assistance with the rudimentary calculations she faced as a fifth grader.
But the tiny shiver that wracked his body each time she stepped into his classroom reminded him to be on his guard.
He was careful to not use the white board for anything except his classwork or her homework; hiding any advanced calculations from her sight in a notebook securely locked in a drawer while she was present. Over time, he stopped bringing that notebook to school, preferring to keep it safely at home.
When the semester ended, he breathed a sigh of relief and enjoyed the break. When classes resumed in the spring and no one knocked on his door, he returned to old habits and forged stunning answers to complex problems during his off hours. Two weeks in, on a day in which he was particularly pleased with his efforts, a small cough caused him to whirl in surprise.
Cynthia sat at the desk she normally occupied for her tutoring. He shot a glance at the closed door, certain he had not heard it open or shut to announce a visitor. Had there been a warning shiver and he missed it?
Her face spoke volumes. The gleam in her eyes, the triumph of her smile and the flush of her cheeks could have been the cheeriness of a normal child. To him, it said she was impressed with what he was fully capable of when unleashed, and he inwardly cringed.
“Mom said I need more tutoring. Hope you don’t mind.”
-*-
Years passed and he decided to retire from teaching. It was hard on his nerves and heart nowadays, always wondering if these new students would learn or harass, earn the grades they wanted or bully his compliance just to get them out of his room. In vain, he searched their eyes when they glanced up from hidden smart phones to see what he taught, but the bright moments were fewer and further apart, leaving him tired and depressed.
As he neatly packed the last remaining personal possessions in his room, the ones he left for the end that could easily be taken home on this last day of school, he felt a familiar shiver and addressed it with his attention.
Cynthia stood in the doorway, two bottles of water in hand.
“Mom said you were leaving. I came by to offer you a drink and my thanks.” She nodded. “I made it. I got my degree.”
She had graduated college; her mother had proudly announced this weeks ago to everyone who would listen. He couldn’t remember what her degree entailed but her mother had been proud of that, too. Cynthia was normal now: quiet, respectful and of adult size. The shiver was the last remaining vestige of creepiness, a habit formed when she was small and scary. It was time to tuck his imagined fears away.
She had needed him. He had tutored her. Truth be told, she was a welcome sight, for she could be counted as one of the successes who came back and let him know he had done his job well.
Cynthia stepped forward and offered him a bottle when he beckoned her in. They cracked open the plastic caps and touched the containers together.
“What are we toasting?” he asked.
“The future, may it always be bright.” She smiled kindly, enough that he felt encouraged to followed suit when she took a drink.
He had forgotten lunch and possibly even breakfast, though never coffee, so the cool liquid sliding down his throat was a welcome relief to his thirst.
“To the future,” he echoed faintly. A hard knot formed in the pit of his stomach. The room felt hot and crowded. A flush tightened his cheek and a spike of adrenaline increased his heart rate. He attributed this state to his anxiety over the future. How long would he be needed in the world? What would he do now?
“I started my own company,” Cynthia offered. She took another sip and he courteously did the same. “I’m a consultant.”
Consulting. He nodded as if confirming her choice of professions, but really he was verifying his own. He could continue his consulting and all would be well.
His stomach relaxed and his head cooled. He entered into a pensive state as he revisited Cynthia’s presence and what her mother had said. Cynthia had majored in chemistry - no biochemistry, he corrected. She graduated with honors. He could see her as a consultant.
He licked his lips and drank again. The water had a delicious aftertaste: earthy - no fruity. His body felt calmer, almost chilled, as did his spirit.
“I still have so much to learn.” Those dark brown eyes sought his paler ones. “You can help me.”
She needed to learn more? A slow, pulsing wave of icy focus seeped through him, settling his thoughts to a slower, more suggestive pace. It was a joy to awaken understanding in others. Perhaps he could help her.
“Finish that and come work for me.”
He nodded and complied.
On his way out, cardboard box in hand, he paused for one last look. The white board gleamed back at him, empty and ready for the next instructor. He blinked at it fondly, recalling the way Cynthia had used it to capture his imagination with a charming bit of artistry.
In fact, he thought as he sought out her smile and watched her hand gently touch his elbow to guide him away, her lipstick was the same brilliant color as that cute little smiley face she had drawn for him years ago.
He barely felt the shiver when he crossed the threshold toward his new life.
-*-