Relatively peaceful was the seventh grade. The faint sounds of buses and birds and construction outside lay down on top of each other and squeezed, disappearing into the tiniest white roar that, in memory, would fade to silence. Resolute rows of open windows felt safe, guarded by a fat pin oak standing sentry between two wings whose bricks now matched its leaves. And even the leaves dropped peacefully.
Miss Hockman's class, their tongues alop, were composing diamantes in groups of two and three, then glitter-gluing the edges and waving them dry. Miss Hockman, consensus told, had the well-behaved class. Across the hall Mrs. Raines's students colored spadefoot toads mostly the wrong shade of green. Some years the gene pool grew shallow, she thought, if not evaporated completely. As long as the curriculum was followed, no matter how vaguely, and the lesson plans lay in Principal Greavy's mailbox, and the seventh grade was relatively peaceful—as long as non-digital clocks extended politically incorrect hands—did it matter?
Miss Hockman sat behind her computer entering comments for progress reports. Always one positive comment and one prescribing improvement. “Good classroom helper. Needs to concentrate more during reading.” Mrs. Raines sat behind her desk doing her nails and coloring them the wrong shade of coral. She liked a quiet classroom, and after the toad-sheets were turned in, the students would be given something else silent to do. Venn diagrams. Long-division problems, which still gave them problems. Cloud-classification fill-in pages. Cirrus, cumulus, nimbus. With illustrations to color. Cumulonimbus, stratus.
Mr. Melvin's room was down the hall, across from the half-day nurse's office. If a student got injured during the wrong half of the day, he could be sent to the office to be treated by the secretary, who presumably could coat an abrasion with tincture of white-out and bandage it with post-its and rubber bands. The nurse was not in, but then no injuries were expected on such a relatively peaceful afternoon.
Mr. Melvin's room was away from the others by mutual faculty agreement. He taught social studies, and the occasional rowdiness of his class was tolerated, but not cordially. He rarely gave seat-work and his fill-in pages were to be taken home. He never sat behind his desk, as he wanted to be in arm's reach of the “little boogers.” He had taught so long that he could get away with such parlance. When the nurse was in the building, she had to put up with the uproar from his doorway, but her lips hardened and her nostrils prissed at his rationale that social studies should be—social. Since this was not her half of the day, it seemed the perfect time for him to find something in his closet.
It wasn't the first day Mr. Melvin had opened up his closet—legendary sanctum, mystic portal, behind which—well, what stories had been bandied, what gestes so often heard, what monumental fables do older brothers and sisters tell? Mr. Melvin was the deathless stuff of dinner-table banter. Parents, ever prone to assume, assumed it was teasing. First-borns may speak truth to power but, to their siblings, they seem programmed to lie like worms on concrete. The assuming parents assumed all rumor was idle.
They watched the siblings fall for it, because they too are programmed. Children bluster and children scoff, but in the end youth is wired to believe. Besides, what power did Mr. Melvin husband that his ex-students would lie thus? His students liked him—enough not to make fun of his name—but he was that perverse anomaly, an unpredictable grown-up. Because little is idle in the imagination of the seventh grade, the testimony grew.
When cafeteria chatter ebbed, the controversy of Mr. Melvin's closet would drift out of soft-sided lunch boxes. He had a dagger in there, some said, and elbows and juice boxes froze in air. A squirrel trap from the Territory, others had heard; a hatchet brown with fox-blood, a Tennessee musket with powder-horn, a Spanish cutlass, a battle-axe. “No way!” spat Tyler through cheetoh crumbs. And Marla would turn and scowl and have to brush the crumbs from her hair—from one table over, such was the distance Tyler could achieve. An Eskimo harpoon, Devon swore, a tiger claw. A prehistoric human bone.
The fantastical list would lengthen, as rumors do germinate in seventh-grade mouths. A Hittite spear, a Gatling gun, a noose from a Texas lynching, a cavalry flag from a massacred fort, a child-sized guillotine (and suddenly Evan stop scratching his neck), a deer horn knife from China, a Mauser—whatever that was, for no one knew. And if there was a word that no one knew, someone would claim it as proof that all the stories were made up. “If Mr. Melvin had a gun for real,” Graciela sniffed, “the principal would fire his ass,” and didn't get the joke. Only their tongues were incredulous. Their imaginations were being deftly sliced by that guillotine blade.
And the seventh grade will bolster its beliefs. With each brazenly arcane word some questing student dared to look it up online: a bec de corbin, a scimitar, a billhook, a calumet, a pole-arm and an iron helm. Would look it up online and report back, and thus would the validity of each instrument be circularly reinforced. A mace with spikes for poking armor, knuckle dusters, misericorde, Watusi shield, astrolabe, bilbo, crossbow, morning star. Even a Walloon cannon ball. (One conscientious parent checking her daughter's search history immediately made a child-psych appointment.)
And medieval contraptions devised to torture students who refused to learn. They wanted even that to be true—all of it, lock, stock, and cannonball. Part of liking him as a teacher was liking his surprises. It wasn't the first day Mr. Melvin went into his closet, but a day for memory and for belief, when shelter-in-place could not protect them. When sentry oak reverted to blind tree and scrunchies could not stanch the blood. A day for wrenching the relative peace of the seventh grade. An afternoon for massive onslaught.
He was telling them the story of—well, does it matter? Check their note pages. Mine their hard drives, for they were diligently jotting the names he put on the board. (27 classrooms in the building and only one needed its blackboard cleaned daily.) He rambled as he walked to the closet behind them and kept rambling as he turned the knob and kept rambling with raised voice as he disappeared within.
Then pencils stopped their tapping tapping, and gummy breaths forgot to turn to air. Heads and butt cheeks swiveled in uniform anticipation. “He's goin' into his closet.”
“. . . into his closet.”
“. . . into his closet,” the echo bobbed around the room. Would they find out if it was all true? Fear is useful at any age. But their reflexes were still developing and they were logy from just eating lunch. Relatively defenseless now as they watched him emerge with demented determination.
And a sword, some later envisioned; a stiletto, others swore. Who could say for sure, so blinding was the gleam of his determination. No, the gleam of—a blood-encrusted battle-axe? An ornately carved tomahawk? Well-honed blades to open young eyes, sharp points to unfetter pulses. He started by scraping their desk-tops, that they would shiver at the metal sound. That they would feel the closeness of the blade to their skin and their arm hair would prickle. That they could count the inches to the fingers of their hands on the shuddering fingers of their hands. Then check that the fingers were all there. He was looking for the first to recoil.
Andrea curled her lip and pulled back. That was all the trigger a zealot needs. (One doesn't have to be crazy to teach these days, he had heard, but crazy to still enjoy it.) The weapon swung in joy and how her teeth cracked and rattled, and forty-four butt cheeks jumped. He windmilled his arm to get several per blow—so not to show favoritism. Straightway he began to slash and stab. Without aiming, but years of teaching had improved his swing. The screams came first, then hysterical laughter. Then important facts to remember, by Jesus, for the test.
And tender ears and wider eyes were flying, jaws were dropping, blood was rising. He ran from row to row to get them all. Smashed desks rained jetting splinters and screws. Bits of scalp were flopping floorward to free unfolded cerebrums. Crimson fingers flew to the vocab board—and stuck there. Wet brain cells spumed, no longer dormant, with hardly a gasp and not a cry, though Graciela pleaded (before her tongue flew across the room) “Are we getting extra credit for this?”
When the weapon was duller than a faculty meeting, he went to the closet for another. A dash for the door, which he stopped in time with an eerily accurate hatchet fling the length of the room. And teeth that never wanted to travel were clattering across scuffed tile. The fortunate cowered 'neath desks and hunted their nostrils. A few of the less sanguine were pinned by knives to the cork board, the poster of a daredevil act in a demonic circus.
He paused only long enough to spell key words for them on the board, in chalk no longer white but pink. There was no safe zone in Mr. Melvin's class that day. The laptop cart was trying to protect those huddled behind it. But technology is so unreliable. An air-splitting thwack, and the bolt from a crossbow found them easily. Now best friends were literally united, three on a single shaft--en brochette, per the French. Shish kebab, say the Turks. A disembodied arm, its wispy hair sticking in five directions, crept up the wall to the plastic cover on the fire alarm. It did not make it all the way.
So many growing body parts, so many smallish faces, so much viscous fluid—for some had been gored right through their seventh-grade hearts. Even if hands had been intact, they couldn't close their laptops for the chopped toenails and intestines. And carpal veins with friendship bracelets. And stray tarsal bones still in gym socks. A teacher's aide passing by looked in at the vertical door-window and considered summoning Principal Greavy. But then thought how splendidly they were paying attention, and went on. Mr. Melvin, sweating now, thought, hell yes (he could get away with such parlance), they're attentive now—and know that learning's a dangerous thing.
When the moans and twitching ceased, the lesson was done, but not his work. He could not, of course, leave them like this—all gory and scattered and deconstructed. So little time to Frankenstein their bodies before the end of school, to make them all presentable to parents in Sunday Republican clothes. And parts of each were doubtless mixed together—so little time, so little time—and some may not have been the same child as before the class began.
With their school pictures for reference (which he kept in a frame by the flag), he tried to match the body parts. Did Rafael get Trina's ear? Was one of Claire's eyes bulging out of Anthony's left socket? And brain cells might find homes in unfamiliar skulls—well, he liked it when the kids enlightened each other. And experienced a novel point of view. However, when Tilda whined “We'd better be getting extra-credit for this,” he knew she had Graciela's lips and promptly switched them.
And who could tell how much time left before the end of school, with tissue and membrane and cheetoh dust obscuring the fractured cheeks of the clock, and hands now even more deformed? With grit and method he slapped together child and child and child and child. With as much delicacy as he, who was not a surgeon, could muster, he squeezed slippery cells back inside insides that would never be as wholesome, having been exposed to corrupting air.
He sat the bodies back at their desks, posed them at their laptops, and cautioned them not to slip on the wet floor on their way out. Though the children were plainly not the same as had tripped into school that day, what with parts of each and all in all and each, and thalamic tissue in unfamiliar brain pans, no parent complained. Not one. And more than a few thought they saw improvement. (Not until Friday did he find Trevor's bladder—still where? behind the terrarium, but Trevor always had trouble holding it in.)
He was barely done when the bell rang, liberating them to run in delirious fear, their mouths a-bubble with blood and ideas—while down the hall the glitter-glue and markers found their proper boxes. They would go home only slightly reconstituted. And tonight across the crescent rolls they would tell what happened—to parents who would doubtless assume they were exaggerating it all. Their blather would send stray spit into the instant potatoes, and fourth-grade siblings would quiver to match the jell-o. By week's end they would, if cognitive objectives were duly met, forget the carnage but remember the significance. They would know and be yet surprised the next time, belief and doubt twining firmly together, than which no fascia is ever stronger.
As he surveyed his classroom, Mr. Melvin mused—despite the books and desks and carts of techno-crap, nothing is emptier, nothing lonelier than a classroom after the students have fled. Still, he was appalled at the mess remaining. And no kid serving detention to clean it up and complain about how the janitor should be doing this, he gets paid to do it. Ignoring the sounds of terror outside his windows—no longer birds and traffic but the mashed-up shrieks of children—Mr. Melvin walked to his closet and, with a quiet bang, shut it for the day.
He knew he was “past his prime and past his time” and getting too old to do this much longer. He was starting to forget his material—places and names and dates of importance. Ancient history had seemed less ancient when he was a beginning teacher, and schools less violent. One more year, he had been telling himself for years.
His performance evaluations could not, by law, suggest retirement. But how delicately did they minuet around the possibility that education might proceed more sedately when he cleaned out his closet for good. Maybe he should. He held the unfashionable opinion that education should not be so sedate. That social studies should not be socially correct. Still, too convinced was he that he would sink to abjectness—the stegosaurus in the tar pit—without his “little boogers” and his closet. And the interface thereof.
Convinced he had been born too late, he cried for the world he lived in. He wanted to create a younger time, a more happily credulous realm, peopled with miniature peasants, hopeful but clear-eyed settlers in a parlous Avalon-by-the-sea that would grow golden as the years survived. He wanted to be the stern yet benevolent king who ruled their weekdays.
He made students suffer a bit for their grades—it couldn't be painless. Mrs. Raines gave them extra-credit for breathing. A rock on the window-sill could earn a B+ and a “Needs to participate more” from Miss Hockman. From him came no gentleness. He never knew why they didn't hate him, for the seventh grade is not known for being magnanimous. He was reckless and demanding and insensitive.
But not heartless. If the afternoon lesson had gotten out of hand, they had bravely learned. Whether they remembered or not—well, Friday's quiz would show. They knew now learning is a dangerous thing. To prove how heartless he wasn't (and to still the puling of Graciela), he would reward them. Went to his grade book and with a tongue, perhaps his own, wetted his marking pen. And in blood, perhaps his own (yes, teaching too is a dangerous thing), he gave them for Tuesday's lesson—extra-credit.
Miss Hockman's class, their tongues alop, were composing diamantes in groups of two and three, then glitter-gluing the edges and waving them dry. Miss Hockman, consensus told, had the well-behaved class. Across the hall Mrs. Raines's students colored spadefoot toads mostly the wrong shade of green. Some years the gene pool grew shallow, she thought, if not evaporated completely. As long as the curriculum was followed, no matter how vaguely, and the lesson plans lay in Principal Greavy's mailbox, and the seventh grade was relatively peaceful—as long as non-digital clocks extended politically incorrect hands—did it matter?
Miss Hockman sat behind her computer entering comments for progress reports. Always one positive comment and one prescribing improvement. “Good classroom helper. Needs to concentrate more during reading.” Mrs. Raines sat behind her desk doing her nails and coloring them the wrong shade of coral. She liked a quiet classroom, and after the toad-sheets were turned in, the students would be given something else silent to do. Venn diagrams. Long-division problems, which still gave them problems. Cloud-classification fill-in pages. Cirrus, cumulus, nimbus. With illustrations to color. Cumulonimbus, stratus.
Mr. Melvin's room was down the hall, across from the half-day nurse's office. If a student got injured during the wrong half of the day, he could be sent to the office to be treated by the secretary, who presumably could coat an abrasion with tincture of white-out and bandage it with post-its and rubber bands. The nurse was not in, but then no injuries were expected on such a relatively peaceful afternoon.
Mr. Melvin's room was away from the others by mutual faculty agreement. He taught social studies, and the occasional rowdiness of his class was tolerated, but not cordially. He rarely gave seat-work and his fill-in pages were to be taken home. He never sat behind his desk, as he wanted to be in arm's reach of the “little boogers.” He had taught so long that he could get away with such parlance. When the nurse was in the building, she had to put up with the uproar from his doorway, but her lips hardened and her nostrils prissed at his rationale that social studies should be—social. Since this was not her half of the day, it seemed the perfect time for him to find something in his closet.
It wasn't the first day Mr. Melvin had opened up his closet—legendary sanctum, mystic portal, behind which—well, what stories had been bandied, what gestes so often heard, what monumental fables do older brothers and sisters tell? Mr. Melvin was the deathless stuff of dinner-table banter. Parents, ever prone to assume, assumed it was teasing. First-borns may speak truth to power but, to their siblings, they seem programmed to lie like worms on concrete. The assuming parents assumed all rumor was idle.
They watched the siblings fall for it, because they too are programmed. Children bluster and children scoff, but in the end youth is wired to believe. Besides, what power did Mr. Melvin husband that his ex-students would lie thus? His students liked him—enough not to make fun of his name—but he was that perverse anomaly, an unpredictable grown-up. Because little is idle in the imagination of the seventh grade, the testimony grew.
When cafeteria chatter ebbed, the controversy of Mr. Melvin's closet would drift out of soft-sided lunch boxes. He had a dagger in there, some said, and elbows and juice boxes froze in air. A squirrel trap from the Territory, others had heard; a hatchet brown with fox-blood, a Tennessee musket with powder-horn, a Spanish cutlass, a battle-axe. “No way!” spat Tyler through cheetoh crumbs. And Marla would turn and scowl and have to brush the crumbs from her hair—from one table over, such was the distance Tyler could achieve. An Eskimo harpoon, Devon swore, a tiger claw. A prehistoric human bone.
The fantastical list would lengthen, as rumors do germinate in seventh-grade mouths. A Hittite spear, a Gatling gun, a noose from a Texas lynching, a cavalry flag from a massacred fort, a child-sized guillotine (and suddenly Evan stop scratching his neck), a deer horn knife from China, a Mauser—whatever that was, for no one knew. And if there was a word that no one knew, someone would claim it as proof that all the stories were made up. “If Mr. Melvin had a gun for real,” Graciela sniffed, “the principal would fire his ass,” and didn't get the joke. Only their tongues were incredulous. Their imaginations were being deftly sliced by that guillotine blade.
And the seventh grade will bolster its beliefs. With each brazenly arcane word some questing student dared to look it up online: a bec de corbin, a scimitar, a billhook, a calumet, a pole-arm and an iron helm. Would look it up online and report back, and thus would the validity of each instrument be circularly reinforced. A mace with spikes for poking armor, knuckle dusters, misericorde, Watusi shield, astrolabe, bilbo, crossbow, morning star. Even a Walloon cannon ball. (One conscientious parent checking her daughter's search history immediately made a child-psych appointment.)
And medieval contraptions devised to torture students who refused to learn. They wanted even that to be true—all of it, lock, stock, and cannonball. Part of liking him as a teacher was liking his surprises. It wasn't the first day Mr. Melvin went into his closet, but a day for memory and for belief, when shelter-in-place could not protect them. When sentry oak reverted to blind tree and scrunchies could not stanch the blood. A day for wrenching the relative peace of the seventh grade. An afternoon for massive onslaught.
He was telling them the story of—well, does it matter? Check their note pages. Mine their hard drives, for they were diligently jotting the names he put on the board. (27 classrooms in the building and only one needed its blackboard cleaned daily.) He rambled as he walked to the closet behind them and kept rambling as he turned the knob and kept rambling with raised voice as he disappeared within.
Then pencils stopped their tapping tapping, and gummy breaths forgot to turn to air. Heads and butt cheeks swiveled in uniform anticipation. “He's goin' into his closet.”
“. . . into his closet.”
“. . . into his closet,” the echo bobbed around the room. Would they find out if it was all true? Fear is useful at any age. But their reflexes were still developing and they were logy from just eating lunch. Relatively defenseless now as they watched him emerge with demented determination.
And a sword, some later envisioned; a stiletto, others swore. Who could say for sure, so blinding was the gleam of his determination. No, the gleam of—a blood-encrusted battle-axe? An ornately carved tomahawk? Well-honed blades to open young eyes, sharp points to unfetter pulses. He started by scraping their desk-tops, that they would shiver at the metal sound. That they would feel the closeness of the blade to their skin and their arm hair would prickle. That they could count the inches to the fingers of their hands on the shuddering fingers of their hands. Then check that the fingers were all there. He was looking for the first to recoil.
Andrea curled her lip and pulled back. That was all the trigger a zealot needs. (One doesn't have to be crazy to teach these days, he had heard, but crazy to still enjoy it.) The weapon swung in joy and how her teeth cracked and rattled, and forty-four butt cheeks jumped. He windmilled his arm to get several per blow—so not to show favoritism. Straightway he began to slash and stab. Without aiming, but years of teaching had improved his swing. The screams came first, then hysterical laughter. Then important facts to remember, by Jesus, for the test.
And tender ears and wider eyes were flying, jaws were dropping, blood was rising. He ran from row to row to get them all. Smashed desks rained jetting splinters and screws. Bits of scalp were flopping floorward to free unfolded cerebrums. Crimson fingers flew to the vocab board—and stuck there. Wet brain cells spumed, no longer dormant, with hardly a gasp and not a cry, though Graciela pleaded (before her tongue flew across the room) “Are we getting extra credit for this?”
When the weapon was duller than a faculty meeting, he went to the closet for another. A dash for the door, which he stopped in time with an eerily accurate hatchet fling the length of the room. And teeth that never wanted to travel were clattering across scuffed tile. The fortunate cowered 'neath desks and hunted their nostrils. A few of the less sanguine were pinned by knives to the cork board, the poster of a daredevil act in a demonic circus.
He paused only long enough to spell key words for them on the board, in chalk no longer white but pink. There was no safe zone in Mr. Melvin's class that day. The laptop cart was trying to protect those huddled behind it. But technology is so unreliable. An air-splitting thwack, and the bolt from a crossbow found them easily. Now best friends were literally united, three on a single shaft--en brochette, per the French. Shish kebab, say the Turks. A disembodied arm, its wispy hair sticking in five directions, crept up the wall to the plastic cover on the fire alarm. It did not make it all the way.
So many growing body parts, so many smallish faces, so much viscous fluid—for some had been gored right through their seventh-grade hearts. Even if hands had been intact, they couldn't close their laptops for the chopped toenails and intestines. And carpal veins with friendship bracelets. And stray tarsal bones still in gym socks. A teacher's aide passing by looked in at the vertical door-window and considered summoning Principal Greavy. But then thought how splendidly they were paying attention, and went on. Mr. Melvin, sweating now, thought, hell yes (he could get away with such parlance), they're attentive now—and know that learning's a dangerous thing.
When the moans and twitching ceased, the lesson was done, but not his work. He could not, of course, leave them like this—all gory and scattered and deconstructed. So little time to Frankenstein their bodies before the end of school, to make them all presentable to parents in Sunday Republican clothes. And parts of each were doubtless mixed together—so little time, so little time—and some may not have been the same child as before the class began.
With their school pictures for reference (which he kept in a frame by the flag), he tried to match the body parts. Did Rafael get Trina's ear? Was one of Claire's eyes bulging out of Anthony's left socket? And brain cells might find homes in unfamiliar skulls—well, he liked it when the kids enlightened each other. And experienced a novel point of view. However, when Tilda whined “We'd better be getting extra-credit for this,” he knew she had Graciela's lips and promptly switched them.
And who could tell how much time left before the end of school, with tissue and membrane and cheetoh dust obscuring the fractured cheeks of the clock, and hands now even more deformed? With grit and method he slapped together child and child and child and child. With as much delicacy as he, who was not a surgeon, could muster, he squeezed slippery cells back inside insides that would never be as wholesome, having been exposed to corrupting air.
He sat the bodies back at their desks, posed them at their laptops, and cautioned them not to slip on the wet floor on their way out. Though the children were plainly not the same as had tripped into school that day, what with parts of each and all in all and each, and thalamic tissue in unfamiliar brain pans, no parent complained. Not one. And more than a few thought they saw improvement. (Not until Friday did he find Trevor's bladder—still where? behind the terrarium, but Trevor always had trouble holding it in.)
He was barely done when the bell rang, liberating them to run in delirious fear, their mouths a-bubble with blood and ideas—while down the hall the glitter-glue and markers found their proper boxes. They would go home only slightly reconstituted. And tonight across the crescent rolls they would tell what happened—to parents who would doubtless assume they were exaggerating it all. Their blather would send stray spit into the instant potatoes, and fourth-grade siblings would quiver to match the jell-o. By week's end they would, if cognitive objectives were duly met, forget the carnage but remember the significance. They would know and be yet surprised the next time, belief and doubt twining firmly together, than which no fascia is ever stronger.
As he surveyed his classroom, Mr. Melvin mused—despite the books and desks and carts of techno-crap, nothing is emptier, nothing lonelier than a classroom after the students have fled. Still, he was appalled at the mess remaining. And no kid serving detention to clean it up and complain about how the janitor should be doing this, he gets paid to do it. Ignoring the sounds of terror outside his windows—no longer birds and traffic but the mashed-up shrieks of children—Mr. Melvin walked to his closet and, with a quiet bang, shut it for the day.
He knew he was “past his prime and past his time” and getting too old to do this much longer. He was starting to forget his material—places and names and dates of importance. Ancient history had seemed less ancient when he was a beginning teacher, and schools less violent. One more year, he had been telling himself for years.
His performance evaluations could not, by law, suggest retirement. But how delicately did they minuet around the possibility that education might proceed more sedately when he cleaned out his closet for good. Maybe he should. He held the unfashionable opinion that education should not be so sedate. That social studies should not be socially correct. Still, too convinced was he that he would sink to abjectness—the stegosaurus in the tar pit—without his “little boogers” and his closet. And the interface thereof.
Convinced he had been born too late, he cried for the world he lived in. He wanted to create a younger time, a more happily credulous realm, peopled with miniature peasants, hopeful but clear-eyed settlers in a parlous Avalon-by-the-sea that would grow golden as the years survived. He wanted to be the stern yet benevolent king who ruled their weekdays.
He made students suffer a bit for their grades—it couldn't be painless. Mrs. Raines gave them extra-credit for breathing. A rock on the window-sill could earn a B+ and a “Needs to participate more” from Miss Hockman. From him came no gentleness. He never knew why they didn't hate him, for the seventh grade is not known for being magnanimous. He was reckless and demanding and insensitive.
But not heartless. If the afternoon lesson had gotten out of hand, they had bravely learned. Whether they remembered or not—well, Friday's quiz would show. They knew now learning is a dangerous thing. To prove how heartless he wasn't (and to still the puling of Graciela), he would reward them. Went to his grade book and with a tongue, perhaps his own, wetted his marking pen. And in blood, perhaps his own (yes, teaching too is a dangerous thing), he gave them for Tuesday's lesson—extra-credit.
Header art by T. Guzzio.
CONNECT WITH TIMOTHY:
Timothy Clutter, a long-time resident of southern Ohio, has taught high-school English for many years and now teaches literacy to adults. He has contributed articles to English Journal and The Sondheim Review and is a newcomer to creative writing. His fiction has been published in Green Hills Literary Lantern (forthcoming in Confrontation), and his poetry in The Broadkill Review, Bryant Literary Review, Prairie Winds, and Straylight
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