Happy Saturday! Dealer's choice for story prompts today led me back to the Story a Day website with today's prompt, which sparked all kinds of interesting things. Also, today I'm ranking both the Reckless Deck and the Sixth Sense Cards from the Writer's Toolbox. (See here for details about the ranking system.)
Reckless Deck gets a 3 in Complexity, a 2 in Shiny (it would have been higher, but the change in font to the practically unreadable one for the World deck definitely knocked it down), and a 3 in Fun.
The Sixth Sense Cards get a 2 in Complexity, a 3 in Shiny (judging them just by themselves, and not the Toolbox as a whole), and a 4 in Fun.
Today's story comes from this prompt, courtesy of Patricia A. Jackson on the Story a Day website:
Removed from the school library by the local school board, a character from the now-banned book shows up to the next meeting to address the Board of School Directors about their decision.
I settled in one of the least comfortable chairs I’d ever found, setting my cane against my leg as I moved my bag to my lap. The aisle was narrow, the seats close to each other, and they were filling up quickly. The people at the front of the room, seated behind a long table, looked nervous as they saw more and more people coming in.
Normally, school board meetings weren’t well attended. However, this was the first meeting to be held after the board had quietly banned two dozen books from the school shelves, and many people wanted to express their opinions about the bans. If they had wanted to avoid confrontation by banning the books without big announcement, their plan failed. I would know, better than most of the people in that room.
A ripple sounded as a pair of people walked in, passing through the people left standing at the back of the room and moving to the seats at the front reserved for those who had requested to speak at the meeting. I shifted over, giving them room to sit down. They nodded their thanks and settled into their own chairs. We didn’t speak to each other, even though we were all there on the same mission. It’s not like we knew each other.
A couple of minutes later, the man sitting in the center of the table at the front of the room banged a gavel and called the meeting to order. “I understand that we have several visitors and observers in our midst today,” he intoned, “and I would like to remind them all that we expect to maintain a civilized atmosphere in this room.”
“We’ll be civilized when you recognize our rights!” a voice from the back of the room shouts, and the room erupts in applause. The gavel comes down several times, loud and imperious, and I flinch with each blow. The woman sitting next to me smiles at me sympathetically. “Don’t worry,” she said, her voice low as she leaned toward me. “We’re doing the right thing. It’ll all be over soon enough.”
I clench the handles of my bag tightly and nod, trying not to allow the noise to overwhelm me. “I’m ready to do this and be done, that’s for certain.”
“I understand that,” the man on the other side of the woman muttered. “I hate having to come out and talk at these things, but this is some bull.”
“I think we can all agree on that,” I replied. My shoulders relaxed a bit as the sound quieted down, and I turned my focus back to the table at the front of the room. Other than the man with the gavel, there was one other man and three women. All of them appeared to be white, which didn’t surprise me - despite the mix of students in the schools this board covered, the leadership usually skewed Caucasian. The man with the gavel looked to be middle aged, as well as one of the women; all of the rest of the board members looked like they might be grandparents, rather than parents. They all looked distressed at the noise from the people in front of them.
“We will open with the reading of the minutes from last month’s meeting,” the man with the gavel declared. There were grumbles among the people in the room, but they kept the noise to a minimum. They seemed to realize that the fast they got through the old business, the sooner they could get to the new business that they had come for.
One of the older women pulled up a tablet and read a short summary of what had happened in the previous month’s meeting. There were very few details, making it sound as though it was done with little human interaction at all. She finished with the final action of the last meeting. “Review and approve list of books to be removed from school shelves due to inappropriate content. Removal is approved, three to two. Meeting is adjourned.”
The crowd began muttering again, but no one got as loud as they did in the beginning; they were waiting for their chance to make their move. I gripped my bag again, and I saw the man and woman beside me sit up a bit straighter as well.
“I understand there are people who would like to speak about the actions of the last meeting, and I have decided to give them two minutes each to say their piece,” the man with the gavel said. I noticed that the hair on the top of his head was a slightly different shade of brown than the hair by his ears and on his sideburns, and I wondered if it was a toupee or just a bad dye job. It gave me something less fraught to focus on while I waited to be called up. Two minutes wasn’t much time, but I could make it work, if I was able to speak the entire time. I had no illusions that I wouldn’t be interrupted, however.
“First on our list is E.A. Presley. Mr. Presley?” The man with the gavel looked around, and then focused on the man from my row as he stood and walked to the microphone in the center of the room, facing the table. He moved easily, with a bit of swagger as he stood at the microphone, dressed entirely in black and wearing jeans that were practically painted on. He just barely avoided striking a pose at the microphone.
“Thank you very much,” he began, glancing at the large countdown timer the woman with the tablet had set in front of herself. “My name is Elvis Presley, and I’d like to know why my life story is being banned from your school shelves. I know I didn’t live the cleanest life, but I don’t know why I would be worth of banning. So, if it please the board or whatever, would somebody be willing to tell me what the hell is your problem with me?”
The room fell completely silent. The man with the gavel kept opening and closing his mouth, as though he wanted to say something and couldn’t find the right words. The middle-aged woman looked shocked, and I saw her reach for the phone that was on the table in front of her, probably to take a picture. She stopped herself with what must have been a heroic effort.
The older members of the board, however, all looked disgusted. The older man, a gentleman with a full head of snow-white hair in a baby blue shirt and navy blue suit jacket, leaned into the microphone in front of his spot on the table. “You, sir, were a degenerate. You married a woman ten years your junior, who you met when she was only fourteen years old. Your music promoted scandalous behavior, and you were well known for your filthy habits. No children in our schools needs to learn about such an unsavory individual.” The two older women nodded their agreement solemnly.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” the woman next to me muttered, as the sounds around us grew louder again. Elvis threw his hands in the air in disgust (and, possibly, defeat), and sat back down. The gavel came down again, and the man in the center of the table cleared his throat and checked a list next to his microphone. “Next is a Sally Ride?”
“My turn,” the woman next to me said, nodding firmly to herself and making her way to the microphone. Elvis stood to let her pass, then slid in next to me so she could take the aisle seat when she got back. “That’s a woman on a mission,” he remarked to me, and I nodded. I was interested to hear how she was going to talk to the board, and stunned that they had decided to ban her, too.
“My name is Sally Ride, and I was an astronaut,” she began, not waiting for the board to give her permission to start. “I was the first American woman in space. I was a goddamned pioneer for this country and for science. Is it because I’m queer? Because I spent the last twenty-seven years of my life in a relationship with a woman? Is that why you decided children shouldn’t read a book about me?” She folded her arms over her chest and waited, staring at the man with the gavel in particular.
I felt a little sorry for the man with the gavel. As far as I could tell, with the way the rest of the board was reacting, he might have been one of the two who had voted against removing the books - our books - from the school shelves. But his was the face dead center of the table, and his was the voice that called us forward to speak, so he was the focus of the ire. I vowed that I was not going to direct my anger to him, unless he gave me reason to. After all, it was the decision of the entire board, not just one man.
This time, it was the woman with the tablet who spoke in response to the questions from the floor. “Yes,” she said cooly, looking Sally up and down as though appraising her for sale. “Your lifestyle was not the kind we wanted children to look up to and admire, regardless of your ultimate achievements. Besides, these days the space program is essentially a relic of the past, so why bother focusing on the people who pioneered things like going to the moon? It’s not like we’re doing anything with that anymore.” She was so confident in her pig-headedness, it was almost admirable.
Sally opened her mouth to respond (and judging by the shade of red her face had turned, I didn’t think it would be a particularly rational or logical response), but the man with the gavel banged his hammer hurriedly. “I’m afraid that’s your time, thank you, Ms. Ride,” he rushed, looking anxiously at his watch, then the list next to him. He turned to me and began to say my name, when I heard another, louder voice in the back of the audience.
“Maybe if you won’t listen to the people the books are about, you’ll listen to the people who wrote the books, mm?” The woman moved through the crowd, which parted before her without complaint. “I believe a few of my books have made it onto your little list of sin.”
“Who are you?” the man with the gavel demanded. The room had fallen out of his control, and he was decidely unhappy about it. He held the gavel as though it were the only real thing in a world gone mad.
“I’m Sandra Cisneros,” she said, making her way to the microphone. “I write books about being part of multiple cultures at once, living in the Anglo and Mexican worlds, the male and the female, the American and the foreign, all at the same time. I write the gray areas where many of your students live, and that they need to know exist and can be places where they can thrive. I write about how to be yourself, fully and completely. So tell me why you can’t let your students read that?”
I couldn’t even hear my own breathing in the silence that followed. The board looked stunned, with the man with the gavel and the middle-aged woman both nodding their heads with Sandra’s words. The three elder members of the board looked furious, but not nearly to the extent they had with Elvis or Sally; in fact, the older man looked less angry and more ashamed the longer Sandra spoke.
“Nothing? You have nothing to say to me? To us?” Sandra looked each board member in the eye. “Then perhaps you might want to vote again about that list of books.”
She stayed at the microphone until the motion was made, seconded, and the vote taken - unsurprisingly, the removal was rolled back and the books were to be put back on school shelves as soon as possible. There were a few people in the audience who began to protest, but Sandra, along with Elvis and Sally, stood and stared them down until they stopped. The meeting ended quickly after the vote, and people were discouraged from sticking around and bothering Elvis and Sally. Finally, the four of us were the only ones left.
“Well done,” Sandra said. “I don’t often get called to these, but I do enjoy making them explain themselves to my face. When I’m an actual person, and not just a name on a book, I find they don’t always have quite the strength of their convictions.” She looked at me, and I felt as though she were reading me and wasn’t sure if she was interested in what she saw. “What about you? I didn’t see you speak, but it looked like you were planning to.”
“Oh, I’m just a small side character from a story in an anthology,” I said, looking at the ground. “A bunch of us were talking about coming, but it can be really hard to get out of the books when there isn’t as much belief there - not like people from the real world,” I indicated at Elvis and Sally, who were making their way out of the room. “Fictionals have a harder time crossing over, so even though a lot of us wanted to come, they elected one speaker, and that was me.” I shrugged. “Guess I wasn’t needed this time.”
She clicked her tongue. “Next time, you get up there first, you hear me?” she demanded, lifting my chin until I was looking her in the eye. “You and yours are just as important as the rest of us. Moreso, maybe, because you have the ability to be anybody the reader needs. And these kids needs anybody and everybody they can get. So you get your voice heard, under stand me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I replied, blinking rapidly to keep the tears back. I took a step back to release my chin from her grasp, and put my bag back on my shoulder. “I do need to get back home and tell everyone the news, though.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “I do as well. I’ll see you next time.” She turned on her heel and strode purposefully out of the room, leaving me alone to make my way back to my world. Did I ever have a story for them.
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