The Real Within the Surreal: Humor, Chaos, and Truth in Flash Fiction
Our Lit!Commons community is full of sharp readers, and this month, Aimee Johnson takes over Allison Wyss’s Reading Like a Writer column. In her analysis of You Too Can Have a Pass Rate Like Mine, she explores how Swati Sudarsan fuses surreal humor with stark classroom realities.
In the flash fiction "You Too Can Have a Pass Rate Like Mine" by Swati Sudarsan, we follow a teacher, Vedha, as she struggles to hold the attention of her students year after year. Despite it being just under 1,000 words, we are treated to a rich look into this strange school where anything can happen, including one kid who snorts sour skittles and a tree branch growing right inside the classroom.
The story opens with the reader joining her students as they enter her room: "They shuffle into their seats, avoiding the desk obscured by a branch that reaches in through the window. I try seating the good kids like a chess board, with the troublemakers squashed in between. When autumn hushes off rain, the kids make puddles of stunts." I love the lush imagery here. We can almost hear the kids as they "shuffle into their seats," and as "autumn hushes off the rain" we can imagine the teacher having to hush her students. And "troublemakers squashed in between" and "puddles of stunts" allows us to experience the palpable energy of the restlessness of rainy days and the unruly energy of kids not yet ready to give up the freedom and playfulness of summer.
Once inside, we immediately sense the classroom’s strangeness. It’s no ordinary place, as hinted when one student "only drinks water she collects in cicada shells from the branch" while another "staples his fingers together," after which he hilariously limps to the nurse’s office. This humor continues throughout the piece, with each school year bringing new zany antics.
But humor isn’t the only hook—we also get delightfully visceral moments. In such a short piece, these ‘gross’ details make the characters feel alive, their hearts beating, their stomachs digesting: "It got so quiet they began to hear their organs gurgling, blood pumping, and the scratch of their thigh skin on their chairs. It was so quiet that when the teacher dropped her pencil, the kids' eyeballs started vibrating. To this day, they have never stopped hallucinating." One of the best moments is when Vedha holds a contest for best prank and gets this surprise: ‘At the end of the week, I announce the winner. Nayha, for making me a tomato sandwich that I almost bit into until I realized she had stuffed it with a used pad.’ It's disgusting, yet I couldn't stop laughing. It's this sort of juxtaposition that makes surrealism so enjoyable.
Yet despite the humor and surrealism, the students’ behavior feels strikingly real. Anyone who’s worked with kids can attest to their strange and unpredictable nature, just like in this story when ‘Jelica throws a pencil like a spear. Reuben turns his homework into origami.’ And in this realness of their behavior I feel empathy towards them, and also for Vedha who comments that each year she wishes they would "Get me mad about something original, I beg them." She’s seen it all—at this point, little surprises her.
Looking deeper, we see a harsh reality common in schools: a classroom that is in disrepair (with a branch growing through the window), students facing educational disadvantages (‘Year after year, the kids come to me just as dense as the ones before’), and a teacher struggling to teach while managing behavior (‘for those few minutes they stop giving each other wet willies’). The way Sudarsan weaves in painful reality against the backdrop of humor and surrealism is masterful.
But the surprise twist at the end, for me, is the best part: Vedha's wild tactics actually pay off! Principal Higgins calls Vedha into her office, "She says, in five years I have never seen a pass rate like yours. Tell me, Vedha, what did you do?" Her results are so impressive that the other teachers have been peeking into her classroom, and the principal wants to give her an award. And here is where we feel a shift in the story, where the teacher feels like the unluckily student called on to give an answer she isn't prepared to provide: "I open my mouth, but it just moves up and down."
The principal aggressively quizzes her about her methods, but the teacher doesn't know what to say. And now we feel ourselves entering Vedha's body, whereas before we were experiencing all the bodily discomfort from the students' view point. Vedha's teeth turn into "dinner plates" when she tries to talk and we can feel the discomfort. We are inside her body, experiencing her mounting panic. And then (and I just love this part) the teacher runs away instead of answering the principal! We started out in the bodies of the children, feeling what they felt, and now we're inside Vedha's to experience her discomfort. This underscores her childish behavior when she runs away from her boss instead of answering the questions. Where she goes and if she ever comes back, we never know, but the call-back at the end to reveal that Principal Higgins was the kid that snorted the skittles in the beginning of the story provides a delightful conclusion to this very strange piece.