Teaser time!

This is just a little blurb from the recent past. It comes from the exciting random ideas pile. I didn't get past more than a page or two, plus a vague outline of plot. However, it has...potential for awesome! ^_^ It has no title to speak of. I have done no editing, save spellcheck and exchanging some instances of pronouns for the character's name.

(Really, I'm just putting it up because it's kind of silly.) Enjoy!

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The trouble had begun, Paul supposed, when he had started school. Before then, his parents hadn’t bothered trying to get him to do math. But once he started to learn numbers, things had gone terribly awry, and no one could explain it. You see, any math equation or use of a ruler led Paul to the inevitable, single conclusion of three-eighths. One plus one? By the time he was done, it equaled three-eighths. The length of the school desk, in centimeters, meters, or acres? Three-eighths. If Suzie has three apples and gives away one each to both Jim and Andrea, she would, indisputably, have three-eighths of an apple left when Paul solved the problem.

It wasn’t that he didn’t know that one plus one equals two, or that the desk measured to eighty-seven centimeters. He was simply, completely incapable of writing or speaking the answer. He tried. He really, really tried. It was an inexplicable and probably magical compulsion to put down, shout out, whisper, or scrawl across the blackboard three-eighths. The teachers all saw him struggle. If Paul tried to write anything other than three-eighths, he scribbled wildly, trying to force out other numbers. Eventually, the lines that might have been the beginning of a four or a one devolved into a convoluted mess and came out the other side as three-eighths. The same thing happened if he tried to say it: a hopelessly garbled noise at the start and an emphatic “Three-eighths!” at the end.

Math was exhausting, and so, from nearly the start of school, he sailed through math on a pass-fail basis, determined by his attentiveness in the lecture parts. His school records had a somewhat cryptic note to this effect. Occasionally, stubborn or puzzled teachers tried to get him to answer a problem. One particularly odious fellow had had him caned every day for a week before finally giving up on “exorcising that willful boyishness” from him via a bamboo switch to his buttocks. Paul failed that year’s math class, but the headmaster overturned the grading decision once Paul’s parents got wind of the whole affair.
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Tada! It interests me to think where I could go with Paul at the helm.