by S. T. Joshi
Brenda McGilicutty pushed her black glasses up the bridge of her nose.
“Your old school had you in a resource room! My mother told me. And you went there every day on the dummy bus, with extra padding on the walls and the seats.”
“That’s not true!”
Rhonda Schlessinger sucked up her snot with a rattly honk. She’d been swallowing it all day, but here she hawked it forward and pushed it through her teeth all lady-like and slow.
The slick package was a hanger for a moment, then flew off left from her lips to smack the Porta Potty over by a padlocked tool chest and pile of timber. A few of the girls paused to “ooohhh,” in appreciation, and for the millionth time Madeline wondered why things like spit-bombs were cooler than puddle rainbows, or pee bubbles, or elbow scabs shaped like half-moons and clover, or those orange traffic cones that looked so much like candy corn everyone had to lick them just once!
“I believe you, Madeline,” Rhonda said, making everything slow down, like a movie, like a snowglobe. “Go ahead and walk across. I’ll be your best friend, I swear. Then you can be a part of our boy-hater’s club.” She batted her lashes. “But you have to hurry so we don’t get in trouble.”
“Yeah, don’t be chicken,” someone piped in.
“Don’t you like us?”
“We’ll tell you secrets about everyone, even the Principal!”
Madeline couldn’t see anything behind them through the wooden slat fence, but down below she could hear the teacher’s aides roaming the playground, starting to break up the game circles in order to collect footballs, Frisbees, and hula hoops. It was almost time for the bell, and if she didn’t move soon they were going to get caught up here off school property amongst all the dangerous equipment: the bulldozers, trash drums, sawhorses, and border posts with little yellow warning flags.
And of course, there was the humongous hole surrounded by caution tape, the one with the plank going across it. The one that was so deep the little angels got lost in it.
Madeline looked down at her shoes, both mud-spattered now, especially the right one with the skinny black buckle strap that was worn to threads where the prong went through.
She’d gone pigeon-toed because she was afraid, and her stockings itched. She wanted to rub her legs together, but she was terrified the girls would think she had to wee, that she was the weird girl who licked things plus the stupid retard who still did a first grader’s Indian dance when she had to make water. So what was it going to be: dimwit or daredevil? Porta Potty or snowglobe?
She stepped forward with a squeal and made a run for it, clicking her shoes along the grained and splintered board almost tippie-toe, all the way to the middle where it bowed down with her weight and went wobbly, where the wide black hole yawned on either side of her and flakes of sediment filtered from the bottom of the wood into the blackness that was still swallowing snowflakes. Madeline froze there, terrified, lost, and then she focused on a knot in the plank before her that seemed just like one of those almonds her mother saved for her in the cabinet above the sink, alongside the flour, brown sugar, and extract.
“So pretty,” she thought, and the voices of her new friends drifted off to the background. Madeline Murdock wanted just one taste, just to see. She made to go down to her knees, and her foot slipped off the edge. The board came up fast and angry, whacking her in the mouth and driving a tooth straight through her nasal cavity. She loved that moment before pain, that sliver of an instant that felt royal and tasted like Red Hots and pennies.
This was a good one.
The sky did somersaults.
When she hit bottom, they all heard the snap.
Mike Summers reviewed what he’d just scrawled into his notebook, cursed, and ripped out the pages. He was no fiction writer and it showed. First, he was unsure of the rule concerning “voice” and “point of view.” He was in Madeline Murdock’s head, but was he supposed to stick solely with a third grader’s lingo? The description of her running tiptoed across the plank was well executed, but he seriously doubted a nine-year-old girl would use the words “sediment” and “filtered.” He ran his thumb along the steering wheel and gnawed at his lower lip.
He liked the movement of the piece, but the background characters were disappointing, especially Rhonda Schlessinger, the spitter. He had pictured her in a light blue winter coat with an Eskimo hood, big nose, and spot-freckles, one above an eyebrow and two below the left ear, the bottom one raised like a mole. She had pale skin, imploring eyes, and a practiced sort of sincerity woven into her speech based upon a soft, well developed interpersonal intelligence her parents praised and nurtured to the point of absurdity. She would wind up being the one who was always elected to speak for the friendship group when they got into hot water, the one who sang with gusto and danced poorly, destined to be the star of the fifth grade choir extravaganza, yet merely a high school understudy when looks and talent started to mean more than heart.
But he’d gotten none of this across whatsoever. Rhonda Schlessinger was a stick figure, and while Hemingway promised the audience would fill in the balance, it was easy to mistrust the process when you were in it knee-deep.
Mike got out his cell for a time check and then looked across the parking lot. He still had ten minutes or so before he was due inside for this multi-school in-service training, and he cringed thinking about Knickman choosing St. Mary’s Elementary as the central location, in fact he cringed just thinking about her in general. Even before she was named department head at Kennedy High she was the type to volunteer for those God-awful curriculum committees, where they pored over mission statements best delivered in their bulleted trend words, the idea that English was a beautiful and necessary universal human discipline, merging the triad of cognitive development, historical interpretation, and cultural meta-diversity or some such lame horseshit. Blah. Her students hated her, and the rest of the English staff wasn’t too far behind, a roll-your-eyes/look-at-your-watch kind of thing.
And Knickman had most certainly chosen this old relic of an elementary school for the sake of contrast, to show all the other department representatives in the Central League how superior she was in terms of didactic technology and state-of-the- art formative learning platforms as compared with this antiquated facility run by a dying archdiocese where they still kept the girls in plaid skirts and rows, chanting their parts of speech and copying notes off the board.
Of course, Mike had misread the instruction section of the email, making him arrive here a half hour early; hence the notebook and the story attempt here in the lot. Pure boredom. It was either that or chance doubling back up Dutton Mills Road to the McDonald’s for a sausage McMuffin with egg. But there was the possibility of getting caught in a line, and Mike Summers was more for relishing his guilty pleasures than rushing them.
It was the perfect setting for a horror story, though, wasn’t it? The building before him was made of old church fieldstone with dark bay windows and doors with high arches. There were outdoor floodlights in the upper corners covered by wire mesh baskets, and basketball hoops without nets. The playground had a jungle gym, a slide that leaned a tad left, and an ancient carousel that revolved ever so slightly when the wind picked up.
To the left up the hill was a construction site barred off by wooden slat fencing most probably erected by property owners more than two decades ago, all dark grey and weather-spotted, rambling along the rise in an alternating rail pattern that let slivers of daylight squeeze through. It was difficult to make out anything on the other side of it really. Mike knew it was a job site from the crane. They were building a new facility up on the rise: it was meant to replace the dinosaur down here, at least that’s how it seemed. And with a half hour to kill, Mike Summers had made his first attempt at writing a short piece of fiction. So called. He crumpled up the three sheets of notebook paper and jammed them into the compartment below the radio where he discarded his dry trash. He�
��d stick to discussing the classics with a boyish enthusiasm, going easy on the grammar and making the kids laugh once in a while. Stick to what he was good at.
He shut down the engine and opened the door. It gave its usual little metallic yowl, but the way it transitioned from the friendly and bumpy sound of the motor to the whisper of winter wind coming over the hood was creepy. If only he’d been talented enough to truly capture this setting with words. He stepped out, checked his zipper with practiced mechanical surety, and moved those long Hollywood bangs off his forehead. He was a bit skinny and slump-shouldered, but never forgot to mousse the top and dangle the front, doll it up a little.
No, he wasn’t advertising. He hadn’t sauntered over to Home Ec. and asked Brandi Cohen out for drinks, even though she smiled at him shyly over her cup of herbal tea every time they sat across from each other in the teachers’ lounge. He hadn’t offered to help Jennifer Dooley set up her biannual CPR session on her prep, even though everyone and their mother knew it was a chance to be alone with her in the weight room when she’d typically wear those stunning pink shorts. He hadn’t even clicked the box on his Facebook that offered photos and profiles of “Mature Single Women in [His] Area,” nothing since Stephanie died. He just had nice hair. And wouldn’t it be a piss-poor example for his little Georgie to start bringing strange women into the house? Granted, it had come awfully close to falling apart for a while, too close, but Mike was a fighter, a role model, and his three-and-a-half-year-old son brought him far more joy than any patch of fur ever could.
He opened the back door to reach in for his book bag, and there was sound from behind, so faint he wasn’t even sure if he really heard it floating down through the pattern of the wind. It was a suckling sound, coming from up on the hill. He turned, stepped a bit wrong, and wrenched his ankle in a way he was sure he would feel more tomorrow. Up on the hill there was something moving, there in the fence between the slats. Something . . .
“Well?” Professor Mike Summers said. “Comments?” It was a small fiction-writing class, yet one with surprising gusto. Trudy Bell had short butchy hair, wire frames, a nervous laugh, and a scarf, always. She was quick as a whip, though, really good with timelines and structural stuff. She was the typical literature major, well used to ruling the roost in these electives where you earned your “fun and easy” credits, and she was sort of at war with Mackenzie Dantoni, with her tight yoga pants, waist-lengthed blonde hair, big eyes (heavy on the mascara), and a startling ability to unpack characters and follow them down to the bitter ends of their neurotic little life journeys. The other three were lowerclassmen and bench talent: Nicholas Donahue, a thick kid who wore shorts even in the middle of winter, and the Stellabott twins, Donald and Daniel, both in dress shirts and ties, both rather shy, both experiencing the mild discomfort of landing in a course where grammar and expertise in the MLA discipline didn’t matter anymore.
Professor Summers gently crossed one leg over the other while his students gathered their thoughts, and he looked rather blankly at the pages before him. There were some unwritten rules in university life. When tutoring in the Writing Center,
you never told the students that their papers were “good,” because anything their professors assigned below an “A” would be your fault. You didn’t change rules on the syllabus unless it was in the student’s favor, and you didn’t bring in your own work for classroom review. It smacked of juvenile conceit and most often shook out to a clear lose-lose scenario. If it was dazzling, the students felt they could never live up. If it was a “work-in-progress,” they wouldn’t respect you. But here, Summers hadn’t really a choice. He had expected at least a roster of twelve and had built the course around the idea that they would review student drafts. The first two weeks had been magnificent, but he’d already exhausted their two pieces of flash. He’d gotten critical responses for five stories from the 30/30 anthology, and they were in the dead zone between that initial rush and the ten- to twelve-pager. He’d needed something for filler.
“I liked it,” Nicholas said, putting his ankle up on his knee and playing absently with the Converse All Star decal that had started to peel. “I mean, I think you were good as a high school teacher, Professor Summers, even though it got a little clunky and boring with the technical stuff the department head lady was into.”
“Knickman,” Trudy said dryly. He looked at her sideways for a second.
“Whatever. I got lost in the jargon.”
“It built the character.”
“Seemed forced.”
“I thought it worked,” Mackenzie said. “He countered all the theoretical language with words like ‘God-awful,’ ‘horseshit,’ and ‘blah,’ letting us know his expertise with it all and at the same time his . . .” She fought for the right terminology, and then smiled rather triumphantly. “. . . disdain and dismissal.”
Trudy stared at her fingers clamped white across the front of the knee, clearly uncomfortable that she was in basic agreement with her rival.
“I liked his hair,” she finally offered in a rare moment of sardonic remittance, and Nicholas chuckled.
Playing it, Professor Summers “casually” moved those random (yet perfectly) placed strands off his forehead and then looked off, thoughtfully stroking his salt-and-pepper goatee to complete the cliché. That got a laugh from the whole group, and Daniel, the more rigid of the two brothers, cleared his throat.
“I . . . uh . . . know this sounds silly, but that little girl scares me.”
“You haven’t even really seen her yet,” his brother argued.
“Not as a ghost, anyway.”
“That’s the point,” Mackenzie said. “You have to hide the monster.”
Trudy folded her arms coldly and spoke without looking at anyone.
“There’s more than that here. The narratorial echo makes it so the author can build her in levels. In a way it’s a cheap move, allowing him to add material from his brainstorming lists through his inner monologue about the writing process. But notice, he pays more attention to Rhonda than Madeline Murdock. He plays a trick with the trick, and that makes it interesting.”
“And the fence is a perfect barrier,” Mackenzie added, “because there’s a chance we’ll only see her in flashes and flickers. If she walks or floats behind it, she’ll just be this dark form moving between the slats.”
“Yes,” Donald said, “and things could pop out from behind the fence.” Everyone turned and gave him a glance when his voice cracked on the word “behind,” but he pressed on bravely.
“I could imagine the teacher inside the school for his staff development, and out of the corner of his eye he sees movement out the window. Then, from up on the hill, there’s something coming over the fence, bouncing in slow-motion toward the parking lot with the snow fluttering down all around it. A red kickball.”
“Wouldn’t be slow-motion,” Trudy said. “It’d have to be in real time or it would give the implication that the Mike Summers character has lost his mind. If that’s the author’s intent, it’s too soon.”
“A tongue!” Nicholas said, so loud it made Mackenzie jump in her chair and put her hand to her chest. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Anyway, the slats of the fence make it so she can stick her tongue through, darkening the wood, maybe picking up splinters like a pincushion and leaving a trail of blood and saliva.”
Silence.
“That was a little too good, Nicholas, but thank you for sharing,” Professor Summers said, and everyone smiled. “In what other ways could we utilize the fence as a masking element?”
Another silence, but a good one. Summers hadn’t expected that they would necessarily add to his fragment of a tale, but if this was the way it was meant to go, it was the way that you let it. Teachable moment, right?
Daniel loosened his tie and folded his hands, then doing the thumb-twiddling thing: “You could have the Mike Summers character march up the grassy incline and grab
two of the slats in order to pull close and put his eye right up to one of the voids.”
“Right!” his brother chimed in. “And just when you think something will poke him in the pupil, another set of hands, dirty with the mud of the hole, grab his knuckles from the other side!”
“I’d save that for the climax,” Trudy said. “The real question we should ask is what the suckling sound is.”
“Her tongue,” Nicholas said. “Licking the fence ‘cause it looks like an elongated Kit Kat or something.”
“I don’t think the sound can be licking,” Mackenzie said. “The teacher is down in the parking lot and the fence is up on a hill, far enough away for the girls to convince Madeline Murdock to walk the plank without being heard by the aides on the playground.”
“Playground’s further than where Summers parked.”
“But still . . .”
“Maybe it’s her head,” Trudy said. “When she hit there was a ‘snap,’ right? Of course we could assume it was a leg or an arm, but consider the alternative. Maybe she broke her neck clean off the spine and when she moves now, her head sloshes around. That would be louder than licking if she’s really rolling it across her shoulders.”
“Maybe it’s a sexual sound,” Nicholas tried. “Like a symbolic echo of the intimacy Mike Summers struggles to recall from his dead wife.”
Silence yet again, but the thick kind now. Professor Summers’s wife Stephanie had actually died three and a half years ago almost to the day while giving birth to their son George. Nicholas clearly hadn’t gotten the memo. Professor Summers felt his eyes dampen, but he kept his voice smooth and professional.
“My apologies, Nick. I should have at least changed the names. We write what we know, often bringing up personal issues in dichotomous contexts, maybe for a bit of self-misdirection.”
He smiled. “No cry for help intended; I just needed to build a character. I’m fine with it at this point, but I must insist that it goes in the hopper.”
“In the hopper,” the rest of the class echoed. It was their code for a piece of writing that was too close to the vest to be scrutinized. Nick nodded and rubbed his nose.