by Lorraine Ray
When school ends that day I'm glad. I hurry away my fastest, past the creosote bush and the snake hole, along the hardened mud rut, to where my mother waits. Holding out the note, I run forward. Mother takes it and reads it to herself.
Oh, there's been a lot of tragedy at your school, my mother explains. Do you remember when Miss Flynn cut her hand on the broken aspirin jar? That was her big nervous breakdown. She lives above her father's funeral parlor and isn't that a strange place for a lady to sleep?
And what of Mr. Harris? Well, Mr. Harris disappointed someone. He was from Indiana or his father was or his mother was or he lived there once-my mother, a big Indiana booster, isn't certain. But the big kids will tell you what happened and there's no use trying to hide anything. He harmed himself. He put a bad finish to the end of his life. But we're Congregationalists and should feel nothing but pity about it. I should remember that.
At night my brother sits on the couch beside me. We watch a Jerry Lewis movie on TV and during a commercial he tells me what the older kids know. Mr. Harris hung himself. Whether you get hung or hang yourself it's all the same: your tongue swells up, turns purple, and sticks out between your teeth. When you go into your grave, you become a skeleton, but it takes a lot of time.
That night in my bed I tussle with my sheets. When I go into my grave, I'll become a skeleton, I tell myself. In the dark room the hunched coats in my closet become Mr. Harris teaching Mr. Rykken to say his r's. I hear Mr. Rykken muttering the rhyme about the rugged rustlers; I can't hear what Mr. Harris says. Only my controlled and repetitious thoughts about rabbits living in a shoebox produce sleep.