

This school kid’s creepy answer to his teacher’s riddle is both hilarious and terrifying

What sort of demon-child would say this?


Everyone loves a riddle. My personal favourite is: “If a plane crashes between Island A and Island B, where do you bury the survivors?”

You don’t bury the survivors, obviously! OK, that one was pretty weak, but still, everyone’s got a go-to brainteaser in their back pocket.

But one teacher, from California, got far more than he could have expected when he gave his first graders a riddle to think over. Here’s the riddle teacher Bret Turner gave to his class: “I am the beginning of everything, the end of everywhere. I’m the beginning of eternity, the end of time and space. What am I?”

Did you guess it?

If not, it’s… 

The letter ‘e’. Eugh.

However, Bret explained on Twitter: “The first guess from one of my 1st graders was ‘death’ and such an awed, somber, reflective hush fell over the class that I didn’t want to tell them that actually the answer is the letter ‘e’, which just seemed so banal in the moment.”

Jesus! DEATH!!??

What kind of demon child would say that? Maybe Damian from The Omen has been born in real life and come to doom us all?

Anyway, Bret went on: “Before I finally revealed the ‘correct’ answer to the riddle, to a largely unimpressed audience, I fielded other guesses that continued along a similarly existential vein. There was ‘NOT everything’, ‘all stuff’, ‘the end’, and maybe my favorite, ‘nothingthing’.

“I’m considering telling the kids tomorrow that a tweet about them went viral, and given their facility with the internets, I expect their response will be ‘sure but did it go SUPERviral’ and ‘just how many retweets are we talking about here’ and ‘can I go to the bathroom?’”

The tweet has now been shared more than 96,000 times.

Writer Brian Firenzi loved it, saying: “Hands-down the hardest I’ve ever laughed on Twitter.” And Amina Khan added: “I just diedddddddd.” (RIP)

If you reckon you’re a dab hand at riddles yourself, give this Playbuzz quiz a go. See if you can get at least 15 correct.     

(Image: iStock)