Homework

“Ted. Write.” I called him Ted whenever I wanted to tell him off. My wife always treated him like a baby, ‘Teddy’ being the youngest in the house. He’d never done a piece of homework by himself, always disrupting everyone else until he was coddled. I wasn’t having it anymore. “Come on, ‘What is your idea of a perfect weekend?’. This should be easy for you.”

Teddy just seemed to whimper as he put hits head between his legs. I put my hand under his jaw and held his face up.

“Just… stare at the blank page and something will come to you eventually. Write one word and cross it out if you have to. If you’re were typing, you’d be able to just delete it, but we both know what happened when I left you alone with my old laptop, don’t we.”

Teddy looked away, pretending like he couldn’t hear me. He didn’t want to do the work.

“Just write something. Just let the words flow out. You can rearrange and replace words if you need to. But you need to erite the first draft first.”

I put the pen in his paw.

“You already know what you like to do on the weekends, so you may as well make a start.”

Teddy whimpered again, but his tactics didn’t work on me.

“Write.”