Uglier Than a Monkey

I stood watching the kids in my class torment the little girl that I always thought looked like a midget. Not a fat one, with a beard, like a dwarf, but a thin small little girl. They were attacking her with words, clawing at her, like in the stories about the wild jungle. She was the small mouse being laughed at by the hyenas.

I could see her shrink, becoming smaller and smaller, until she was the size of a broken pencil. Or was it the kids around her that grew bigger, like those big buildings you see in the city that reach up higher than the sky. The buildings that surround you and you feel like there is no way out.

Suddenly, as in a flash of lightning; she was gone. She ran into the forest, like a small mouse escaping a horde of cats. The forest was the place we always used to play; we climbed the trees, and hung by our legs upside-down, playing bats and squirrels, and any other animal that lived in the trees. Now she was climbing there to escape the kids that followed her.

All this time I only stood and watched, doing nothing, because kids are supposed to be like that. It happened to everyone, and now it was her time, there was nothing more I could do than watch. Me and Carrie watched her. We didn’t feel sorry for her, why should we, we had been through the same thing, and she had never felt sorry for us.

“She looks like a monkey…” I pointed out, wrinkling my nose as I once saw a woman do on TV.
“She is uglier than a monkey!” Carrie said and wrinkled her nose too, because I had shown her how to do it earlier. We were really cool standing there with wrinkled noses.