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All over the room he heard plastic ripping. With weep and growing despair they pulled out the little white sticks. The teacher watched with impatience.The pitiful students however were left with nothing but their lives and the horrific, surgical instruments, that looked clean but also seemed to spread an aura of pain. He began with the procedure. He felt a lump in his throat, as he listened to the wailing voices and the exhausted gasps from the next room. So they were already finished? This hadn’t been the first time, either for him or his neighbors. Everyone wailed but nobody screamed. That's how he knew that everyone in the other room had been lucky. While the procedure was horrible - many students would rather escape it by dislocating their shoulder and staying home - you would really be unlucky if you didn’t pass the procedure. He had seen it once…

He began sweating as he remembered. It had been his friend Fitzgerald. After the procedure, suddenly Fitzgerald had started screaming. The door had opened and people with sunglasses in black suits and with a straight face had barged in, dragging Fitzgerald out the same door out which they had appeared from.This had been 2 months ago. He had heard nothing from Fitzgerald ever since. But now he had to focus on the procedure. One hour before he had taken a pill - like many of his fellow classmates - to prevent shaking. While everybody feared the procedure to their bones calm was essential for passing. So he opened the bag, pulled out the white stick with a cotton like white tip and started penetrating his nostril. As he did, he watched Mugello another classmate of his bleeding heavily out of his nostrils. That happened a lot. Sometimes they would bleed out and die. But Mugello looked ok, sweaty of course, just as anybody else, but ok. As he shoved the cold, the hell freezing stick deeper in his nostril, his eyes became wet, he felt the need to sneeze, but suppressed it by tensing his face muscles, sneezing was not wanted. He heard a loud screaming, high pitched voice in his head, it always came when he had shoved the stick up deep enough. He turned the stick five times, stressing his nose tissue. He could feel the cold material of the stick rubbing over his flesh. It made a disgusting dragging sound, just like a hurt animal would do trying to escape his hunter. After he was finished with the left nostril he repeated the same routine with the right. Now the gut wrenching pain also started to burn in the right nostril, making his whole face feel numb. This would stay at least for 9 hours. Sometimes he cried all night because of it. After he had penetrated both his nostrils and had stirred inside them like in a tough casserole, he pulled the stick out and plunged it in a little bottle filled with a mysterious fluid. The fluid wasn’t the only mystery of the procedure. The students had to do it every week, if they asked why - they had stopped doing that long ago - they could expect much trouble from the government. Everyone was more scared of the black suited men than the
white pipe like sticks in their noses. The fluid had become gross. A mixture of nose tissue and snot and sweat. He secretly prayed that the sweat wouldn’t be a problem, but he had heard of instances where it had been. He couldn’t help it though, the sweat came with the pain. He put 4 drops of the slimy fluid in the testing contraption and watched the scarlet line make its way through the contraption. Two stripes would mean never seeing his family again, one stripe would mean more procedures...

(aus dem Englischunterricht von Gl)