“To be or not to be” thought Will. “What the hell did that
mean?” His teacher had asked him to write 370 words about it. He didn’t know
why she had chosen that number and why she had given him that option instead of
being suspended. He wondered now why he hadn’t chosen three days to walk about
the streets doing whatever he wanted instead of this boring essay.
He googled it and learnt three new words, soliloquy,
Shakespeare and Hamlet. It also said the most famous of all literary quotations
but there is a deep disagreement on the meaning of both the phrase and the
speech. “Great” mused Will, I’ll write those words and Miss Page wont be able
to diss them. He hadn’t yet learnt the meaning of plagiarism.
He downloaded the film Hamlet, it was ancient, made in 1996
but that blonde in Titanic was in it Kate Somebody and Kenneth Whatshisname. It
went on for four hours but somehow the time went as quick as when he played on
his X box. His mum yelled up the stairs “turn that rubbish off and get to
sleep”.
It felt strange, it wasn’t rubbish. The way they spoke was
strange but Will was mesmerised. Here was this bloke agonising over death,
suicide, murder, wandering about with a skull. He picked up his pen and wrote
370 words, no more no less.
In later years when interviewed on television he would talk
about Miss Page and why he called his first best seller 370 words. He’d forgotten by now the reason why suspension had been
threatened. His genre was referred to as Street Shakespeare. He’d watched every
film, saw plays at The Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford Avon but never read any of Shakespeare’s texts.
That would be too boring.
It was published on National Flash-Fiction Day Flashes. http://t.co/CBcFWpTZ
I'm beginning to think I could become a writer, although at the moment I feel like I'm dabbling at it.
