“Hey, you know our art teacher? She’s dead.”
The gym floor insulates the chilled bodies of all the Barrington middle school students. My outfit resembles the rest of my peers – a thick, wooly overcoat as a bare necessity and warm, worn out boots that leak pools of slushy snow.
“Yeah right, stop joking,” I scoff at my friend, and my brain freezes as though unable to absorb oxygen from the stuffy air.
“Oh my god. It’s not funny. Stop laughing, you’re horrible,” she says, and she looks at me with utter disgust. I realize now why my cheeks ache. They’re paralyzed from creasing my face into an awkward grin.
Even now I don’t quite remember her face. It might have been round with a pudgy chin and she might have had beautiful eyebrows that emphasize a benevolent face. Her hair might have been the color of secure, soft earth and she might have been short as to reach only my shoulders. She might have had a picture, framed to contain herself, a serious looking man, and a baby wrapped up in her protective arms. And while every other detail remains foggy, I vividly sketch her hands in my mind’s eye.
The flesh abundantly surrounds each short finger which ends in a round, sensible nail. The gray clay leaves a permanent stain that runs through the many creases on her palm like a flowing river endlessly splitting into a thousand different tributaries. Her chubby hands deftly hold a scalpel as she carves a row of x’s into the pliant, submissive clay. And with equal skill, they lightly clutch onto the tip of a brush as she soothes water into the parched substance. They always handle our clumsy fragile crafts with care as they ease them into the massive kiln. They pull out baked, deformed things with equal concentration. They caress our mugs, both wrapped tightly, comfortingly around our ugly creations.
Because I cannot delineate her existence completely, I find myself imagining how it happens. The heater hums quietly, but the window wipers crank furiously as they slide the heavy snow off. The silence is tense because the road is slicked with ice and they see nothing but a mist of pure white. And then the tires skid, the x rubber markings rolling continuously on either wet, pliant powder or on harsh jagged crystals of frozen ice. Either way, the result is ugly. She dies, and so does the serious man at the wheel and the innocent baby strapped up in its own car seat.
And then I am back in the dimly lit gym, the chattering of innumerable students who just returned from winter break rises in crescendo until I block it out. But I cannot avoid the gaze of contempt that judges me and my awkward grin.
I want to say ‘she was my art teacher not yours’. I want to tell her ‘you’re lying’ and at the same time ask ‘how can they be dead’? I want to climb back into my safe bed and pull the covers over my head. I want to remember her face and I want to squeeze a tear from my caked tear ducts. I want to complain that life’s not fair and death’s even worse. I want to explain that I’m not a monster. I want to comprehend already and I want to rewire the nerves in my brain. I want to see those hands work magic again.
But I cannot do a single thing. I can’t because my lips are sewed shut with water and cross stitches, baked dry into a horrible, horrible smile.
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