English as a
Second Language
by Pavelle
Wesser
George sat in the third row
of his English as a Second Language class,
otherwise known as ‘ESL,’ struggling to
keep up with the teacher. Lately, he’d
been too tired to focus. He looked up as
Julia walked in and was suddenly wide awake and
staring at her beautiful breasts which bulged out
of her low-cut shirt.
“And a pronoun
replaces a noun,” the teacher droned,
“for example: I, you, he, she and it.”
He sighed. Her breasts
could compete with the highest mountain peaks. Was
she married? He hadn’t noticed a ring on her
finger, but then, he’d been so preoccupied
with her breasts…
“Consider this
sentence: ‘Ellen goes to school.’ Which
pronoun would replace ‘Ellen’?”
“Julia,” said
George, admiring how her chest swelled gently
with each intake of her breath.
The teacher’s
bespectacled gaze fell on him:
“‘Julia’ is not a pronoun, George.
It’s a proper noun. The answer is ‘she.’”
Julia glanced up and
offered a clueless smile. The teacher’s lips
thinned as she scribbled on the board. “We
must move on to adjectives.” She turned on
him with a vengeance. “George, give us an
example.”
“Beautiful woman,”
George stuttered.
“Wonderful, George,
‘beautiful’ is an adjective describing
‘woman.’ I hereby nominate you
student of the week.”
George looked at Julia, who
had removed her compact and was reapplying her
already perfect makeup.
“Stand up, George.”
George stood self-consciously
as the teacher clapped. A crescendo of snores
rose from students who’d fallen asleep and
were blissfully drooling onto their desks’
marred surfaces. Julia gazed in his directions
and he felt sure she wanted to communicate an
important message to him, until he noticed her
eyes were focused on a point beyond him.
She stood and paraded past
him toward a tall, muscular man who stood in the
doorway. George ogled her lovely breasts as they
passed out of his reach, taking with them the
amorphous blob of promises unfulfilled. He
had one last view of her perfect rear as she
hugged and kissed the man at the door before
heading out with him.
“George,” the
teacher was saying, “what is an adverb?”
He turned to face her, all
too aware of the groaning, sighing mass of
slumped over bodies surrounding him.
“George!? I am waiting
for your answer.”
He lowered his eyes to the
flab that dripped over the waistline of her ill-fitting
skirt. In that instant, she reminded him of his
mother, who had never ceased telling him that he
was both a burden and an ignoramus throughout
most, if not all, of his childhood.
“I must to leave,”
He sputtered, running from the class.
“George, come back! We
still haven’t covered prepositions.”
The nightly breeze was
refreshing. Tomorrow was another twelve-hour day
washing dishes. He had lost nothing, he reasoned,
by attending ESL class, which in any case was
offered for free. And freedom was what America
was all about, wasn’t it? So why did he feel
so trapped?
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