Free Better Living Through Plastic Explosives by Zsuzsi Gartner

retrograde.
    I can almost hear you sighing, Miss Subramanium. It isn’t my tendency to psychoanalyze, but it’s not difficult to imagine what this fear of white space implies. You don’t like to be alone, do you? Whiling away empty hours fills you with an unnameable terror, does it not? There are people who can help with this—God knows I have a list of contacts as long as my arm. Just say the word.
    The point of art, Miss Subramanium, is in not meeting expectations. Ha! Yes, that is the point! I surprise even myself with this revelation. So Georgia, in “not yet meeting expectations,” is, in fact, at the top of her class. Art, and here I include dance, music, film, and belles lettres, is perhaps the only human activity where not meeting expectations corresponds with success, not failure.
    And in a life full of almost continual, albeit inconsequential, disappointments, with others, with ourselves, in a life full of notable failure (to secure a date with Daryl Sawatsky for the high-school graduation dance; to place in the top percentile of your statistics class despite pulling enough all-nighters and popping enough bennies to fell an aurochs), this ability of the few to defy, to subvert, expectations gives the rest of us something to live for—vicariously, in the third person as it were.
    In all fairness I should tell you that your self-referential habit when addressing the children has become a source of amusement at our house. Miss S. is getting frustrated over the level of the noise in the classroom. Miss S. needs someone to run to the office and get her some Tylenol 3s. Miss S. needs a minute to finish her text message to her ex-boyfriend. “Miss S. sounds likes Dobbie in Harry Potter ,” Georgia said the other day, and we shared a laugh, picturing you as the beleaguered house elf smashing yourself on the head with a desk lamp after one transgression or another. That actually brought some tears to my eyes. (My husband came to your defence; feathered earrings and patchouli-scented heavy-metal cotton Ts no doubt dangling like sugarplums over his head.)
    Perhaps you come from a troubled home or even a troubled country, if your last name is any indication. It is not in my nature to pry. But your quest for order appears to me a manifestation of an obsessive need to wield complete control over your small fiefdom. The word martinet comes to mind. How am I as a parent to know that an ill-timed scrawl outside the lines won’t trigger a psychotic episode due to undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder; that you’re not above administering medieval forms of punishment? How am I to ascertain that my child is safe in your classroom, with its almost Pol Pot-ish rules about behaviour? What’s next, Miss Subramanium, a pile of polished skulls in the supply cupboard?
    Can I call you Shayana, Miss Subramanium? Miss Subramanium is, after all, a mouthful, and so formal considering I am technically old enough to be your mother. As for Miss S.—well, I’m hardly one of your little charges.
    There was a time, Shayana, when I wore my era’s equivalent to your dreamcatchers and rebellious T-shirts. I had aspirations. I was giddy with my own sexual power—a simulacrum of power fed by the illusions of youth and a type of wan beauty, but power of a kind nonetheless. Every day brought a new opportunity for adventure. Did I imagine then that I would spend the bulk of my days, year upon year, in a small office cubicle with an Excel spreadsheet on the monitor in front of me, a photograph of a laughing girl on a portable potty as my screen saver, and on my desk a miniature inflatable punching bag (a Secret Santa gift from my colleagues) of the existential figure from Munch’s The Scream ? Not for a moment. I was going to be an artist.
    I had an advantage over my fellow students at the art college—I could see voices as colours and shapes, and without the aid of any psychotropic. As