by Marshall Payne

Due to a matter in the principal’s office, Raymond Messner was a couple of minutes late arriving to his third-period class. Not that his seventh graders were typically all that well-behaved, but today he walked in on a verbal dispute that was about to rise to physical proportions if he didn’t put a stop to it.

“She can too kick all of their asses!” Josh Tyler was spouting. “Any day of the week and twice on Sunday.” He was a big, red-headed kid with a firmament of freckles.

“Can’t neither,” scoffed Dave Tornsby. “Macbeth’s witches had the power of the Bard’s seventeenth-century pen. Homer’s Medusa was nothin’ but a pussy-whipped Gorgon. Even Perseus, whether Zeus’ kid or not, made short work of her. Decapitated the snake-haired bitch.”

“Hah!” said Josh. “Everyone knows that supervillains back in the classical period--especially Ancient Greece--were more powerful. Shakespeare”--he spat the name like venom--“wasn’t even real. Just a pen name of Francis Bacon. Or Marlowe after faking his own death.”

“And you think Homer was real?” Dave countered hotly.

“Of course. It says so right here on the cover.” Josh held up his dogged-eared copy of The Iliad, an illustrated version from Constantinople Comix. “But that’s not the point. Any one of Homer’s Gorgons can beat any three of Shakespeare’s witches, and you can throw in Hamlet’s ghost to boot. ‘Double double, toil and trouble.’ What nonsense.”

“Well, I say that Shakespeare can easily whup Homer.”

“Can’t.”

“Can.”

“Can’t!”

“Can!”

Derk Severide, sitting in front of the two boys, turned. “Well, I doubt if any of them could survive Dante’s Inferno.” Tall, blond, and well-groomed, he was the jock of the class. Came from Old Money.

“Let’s not be bringing any Italians into this,” Dave said, lover of Brit-lit.

“Who wouldn’t have even begun his journey if not for the spirit of the classical poet Virgil,” Josh put in.

Julie Forster, who was sitting in front of them all, turned and rolled her eyes toward Raymond Messner’s entrance. “Shhh!” she hissed.

“Mind your own beeswax,” Josh told her.

“And stick to your damned romances,” said Dave.

Angrily, Julie turned, ignoring them. But she was a lover of the classics, as well. From Jane Austen to Jane Eyre. Though hers was a subtler, more refined tale, it was still escapist fiction.

Moving to his desktop lectern at the front of the classroom, Messner cleared his throat. “Settle down, class,” he told them. Not that he’d admit it, but it was partly his own fault. He shouldn’t have dallied in the principal’s office. But what possessed them to read such trash anyway. When he was young, such fanciful tales had been proscribed. Myths and legends . . . what tripe.

After he had everyone’s attention, he said, “Okay, class, put your comic books away and open up your textbooks to page one fifty-five. Today we will be discussing the lingering effects of post-war Japan on the twenty-first century. Now, who wants to tell me who Godzilla was?”

A collective groan swept the class.

* * * THE END * * *