Stephen

Here was the child who at twelve years of age broke the bladed lever from a paper cutter and wielded it against his teachers as a scimitar. 

By the time the police had found him he had made it nearly five blocks from the schoolyard. He would have made it further, the teachers had conjectured, had he saved his breath rather than ululating a battle cry every other step. 

Stephen Morkel was not a significantly big boy. But he was unassumingly strong. He was just below average height, of a gaunt build, and wore a head full of knotted brown hair. When he wasn’t wielding a makeshift scimitar his hair was all that made him identifiable against the backdrop of his school peers: great tufts of hair were knotted from the nape of his neck to the top of his ears; what bangs he sported were windswept. He was fidgety and made everyone around him turn and twitch in anxiety of his next move. 

On this particular occasion Stephen and his classmates had been working on a cutting and pasting construction paper into a collage of their choosing. The paper cutter was, per the teacher’s orders, off limits. Safety scissors, she had said, would do just fine. Everyone was sitting quietly cutting polygons and imperfect circles of the many varieties of construction paper. Even Stephen was sitting, though he was struggling to get his scissors through a dozen or so pieces of paper. 

The first fifteen minutes passed in silence as the students diligently took to transforming their ideas into two-dimensional representations. Then there came a high-pitched screech that modulated up and down until the sound found two notes it could sustain in rapid succession. 

When the teacher regained her constitution Stephen had moved from the paper cutter to the window, slashed the curtains ineffectively, and pulled them from their rings while  and  in one motion wrapped it around his neck and face as sort of mask and cape. 

The students sat and watched. A few were still running their glue sticks over the paper they had cut. The teacher had gotten to her feet but had not moved from behind her desk. Stephen’s banshee shriek resounded down the hall. His hood and cloak, patterned with apples and letters of the alphabet, tailed behind him as he sprang from the classroom into the hallway.