Hm.

Well that was longer than I thought.
Everything I've written this semester has been eight pages, at least.

I loved your last piece! Great verbs: trees stuffed with birds, for example. I'm excited for your upcoming adventures in Creative Writing classes!
And guess what? I'm coming home in a week!

(I still need a title)

The way they looked at her was even worse than the way they looked at eachother: black-lashed boredom and dismissive blinks. Here and there was a hot salt-water twinkle of interest, but these glances were quick to retreat. They joked with one another clumsily, smiling brief smiles from round cheeks and raw noses, but mostly they hunched in their sweatshirts, looking wary and afraid of something. They were afraid of their fiery brains, definitely, thought Keri at first, definitely; they were afraid of success and their own sharp potential.

“Hello!” Keri felt the smallness of her solo.

Eighteen fifth-graders, assorted, in graphic tees and thick-tongued tennishoes, breathed back at her; they didn’t even look. One boy in a tan snowsuit sucked on paper in the back row.

            “It’s like they don’t even hear me,” Keri told Andrew, after three weeks of straight mouths and dim stares.

            “They’re warming up to me. Great kids,” Keri told five stout chairs in the teacher’s lounge.

            “I want to help you,” Keri told her grey-eyed class, graciously.

            “I want to kill them,” Keri told her mother “Well, not exactly, exactly. Not all the way dead. And then I want to bring them back to life, you know?”

            “Kindof defeats the purpose, bringing them back to life.” Keri’s mother was practical and left-brained. A real trouper, Keri told her friends, and her mother’s friends, after the great divorce and family demarcation. “Kill them or leave them alive; no backtracking.”

            “You know what I mean.”

            “I don’t.” Keri’s mother was swept up, white-blond hair in a clip, the kind with teeth. A light sweater lapped against the shore of her lighthouse neck and two collarbones like sharp rocks worn down. Keri sighed.

            “Me either.”

 

From her desk, Keri watched then move like newborns: sudden head movements, awkward looking limbs, but mostly limp in the hard-backed chairs and still, sleeping through the most interesting chapters of imperialism, and every single preposition. Amber, a girl with dirty hair in the front, who said this is boring like a film critic, like a boring film critic, stared at her shredded fingers.

            “Your first writing assignment is due on Monday,” said Keri, “You can write anyone—grandma, singer, actor, friend—whatever. Just write anything to anyone and bring in your letter, and address, and an envelope, on Monday. Use the format I showed you.” Keri smiled, every tooth a smooth kernel of resentment. Most of the class scored low for literary intelligence. The smart half of the fifth-grade was across the hall with Mrs. Z. The school divided them like that and everybody knew, except Keri, when she was hired for her promising personality and clear teaching merit. Promising personality, don’t we all. Keri was tired. “Any questions?” She looked out at the class, a rebel exodus, expectantly, a sort of joke. Big Ben was talking to the girl next to him, deep huh-huhs like a secret underwater laugh. Alexis was sweet in the corner, quiet and probably listening, careful not to make eye-contact, shrugging finely. Christopher was lost in his clothes, this little guy with a stutter and a fresh skull shirt for every false start: K-K-Kk-Chris. Then Cory, in the back, in the tan, ridiculous snowsuit, eating paper.

            “Cory, quit eating paper,” Keri’s mouth was tight pink and heavy edged. Cory looked at the paper, and at her, fleetingly.

            “Why.”

            “Not for eating.”

            “Sgood for me.” Cory nibbled, front toothed a corner of blue paper.

            “So is school. Pay attention. Save the trees.”

            “I’m hungry.” Cory smiled and the class smiled back, thick-lidded, intelligent smiles.

            “Pack a lunch.”

            “I like paper.” Cory put the paper in his mouth again, and looked at her. Keri felt like a tight black line, stretched between two points. She felt the chill of adrenaline in the back of her neck and stepped closer to his desk.

            “I don’t care,” she said, “don’t eat paper in my class.”

            “Why.” His voice was like a whisper, caught around the edges of the paper. Keri leaned slowly into his space.

            “Why,” she whispered back, “don’t you give me the paper,” and with a sudden twist, she grabbed the sheet he was sucking on and ripped it from his mouth. Her hands were shaking and she held them out on either side of her head. What now? Her instinct was to shove it all back into his mouth. Eat it, she’d say. S’good for you. She threw away the paper, but that night she felt like she had missed something important.

            “Is paper good for you?” She asked Drew, her house-husband for now, until he found another job. She thought of the paper—one ply, half a ply—and the color blue, September sky. And then she knew what she was missing—his face, Cory’s face when she had torn away his paper, rattled his teeth, frightened his gums, that was just it; she had frightened him. He was afraid of her—her disapproval, her hatred, her despair. He was afraid of her eyes, to look and see how she saw him, a big fifth-grader eating paper like a kid. He was terrified.

 

            “Can I write you, Mrs. F?” Charity was begging, because she hadn’t brought an address for her letters, but she had written, a stack of words and drawings, even a black cross drawn in marker, labeled cut out and hang on the wall, or use as necklace. “Mrs. F?”

Keri sighed. F for Farmer. The teacher’s lounge was an alphabet soup: Mrs. A, Mrs. B, Mrs. C, and they loved it.

            “Sure,” said Keri, pinching the envelope gently.

            “Are you gonna write back?” Charity sounded hopeful. She was hopeful sometimes, and the rest of the time she was quiet or tearful or raging.

Bi-polar, said Mrs. B.

            Some emotional disorder, said Mrs. G.

Awful family, said Mrs. A.

Nice kid, said Jo, the PE coach, with a concise and confiding nod. Runs fast.

            “Sure.”

 

            There was old coffee in the teacher’s lounge, and old carpet, the smell of warm paper and the music of paperclips. Keri imagined Cory, eating up all the school copies, all the files, scarfing reams. Mrs. A sat tidily at a black table, legs crossed and clean, thick framed glasses. Her perm was thin and rigid as a lampshade, and she had the shiny, taut look of a button. Keri sat across from her to read Charity’s letter, glancing up to nod and smile occasionally to whirlwind teachers who sucked in their breath and hurled themselves out the door as if they were headed into a deep Alaskan winter without a scarf.

Dear (blank), What is your favorite color. Ok. I like to play music. What do you like to play. My other game is sorry I like that game. My favorite animal is a dog. My dog Dot died and they barride her. She was like my dotter. I loved her so much and I fill like I did it but my Dad was driving. She was going to the bathroom and she hit the tier and died. She did not feel pain and I gottogo Bye.

           

            After that was five pages of a pop song, written out word-for-word.

Boy how could you lie to me/Thought you would die for me/Im not accepting another opology.

            After that was the cross drawing, and another drawing labeled packman eating a flower, and next to that, a rather observant rendering of a pop can with Dr. Pepper crayoned to the side.

            Keri didn’t know what to do with her mouth. She felt the inappropriate stir of a giggle, and the stinging shrapnel of sadness in her diaphragm, both from this letter, a hand-made grenade straight from the fingers of a child soldier. What now?

            “What do you know about Charity Ramsey?” Keri asked, accidentally forceful. She heard herself and imagined throwing Mrs. A’s coffee cup against the wall, and snatching her cross-stitched collar like kleenax, talking real close to her face, tell me what you know! The quivering perm.

            “Who?” Mrs. A looked up, startled.

            “Charity Ramsey,” said Keri pounding her iron fist on the table, “what do you know about her?” Mrs. A thought.

            “She has a bad family, but I don’t know much about it. In and out of jail.”

            “Oh.”

            “That’s a pretty old story.”

            “Mm.” Mrs. A leaned over her coffee mug, trailing a heavy breast through crumbs on the table.

            “Now one of the third graders—his mom tried to drown him at the beginning of the school year. That’s one I hadn’t heard.” Keri blinked and tried not to imagine his eyes round as milk caps, rolling back, or the chill of the water. She thought of her class, and understood, in choking bathtub waves, that there was more to fear than success and sharp potential, so much more. There was your dangerous parents, and your bathroom, for starters, and your teacher, who looks at you the way your mother does, and school, rigged to humiliate you, like everything else. Keri read the letter again, and began printing her reply on a sheet of copier paper.

Dear Charity, My favorite game is Candyland, and my favorite animal is a cat, but I like dogs too. I bet your dog was really nice. I’m sorry that she died, but it wasn’t your fault—

            The rest was lighthearted and silly, like dinner conversation with someone you don’t know very well. Keri drew shooting stars all along the edges of the envelope and licked it shut. Charity, she wrote on the envelope, and checked Charity’s letter for a return address. 45 Nebraska St., the main stretch in Marion, IN, where the two-story-ranch-with-a-walk-out-basement people lived across the street from neighbors with leaky roofs, trees growing in their gutters, and thirty dollars every two weeks for groceries and diapers and chapstick.

            Keri was curious, and altered, for the time, by Charity’s letter, and Charity’s house was two blocks from the school. There was compassion and pity, even guilt for hating Cory, so Keri decided to hand-deliver her reply as a way of saying I’ll be here, anything you need, without actually saying it, and something else—an offer of friendship? Timid, offered like a piece of hard candy at recess, one piece of candy for each of the cool girls, who stood at the highest part of the playground and sang loud. One piece each, and you could stand with them, feel something rise from the mulch to play with your hair and then disappear.

            In the car, Keri fastened her seat belt and sat straight. She found the winding street no problem and maneuvered between wind-blown trash barrels and black eyed children on bikes. Keri pulled her car up to the large-mouth mailbox, speckled with rain dirt, and tossed in the letter. As she pulled away, a blonde twitch of movement at the side of the house made her look past the mailbox, the sinking sidewalk, and the wild junipers. Charity, with a garden spade. Keri parked the car, quick, pulled her letter from the mailbox, and cut through the grass, waving at Charity with the letter.

            Keri couldn’t remember what came first, the fist in her throat, counting all the things there were to fear, or the smell that pushed down her throat like another fist, colliding knuckle to knuckle with the first. Keri tried not to look, but she saw the broad, rotting back of an animal. A dog. Charity was digging up her dog, wiping her forehead with the hard work of pain. Keri put a hand to her nose and here was Charity’s next letter:

My dog died and they barride her,

and I unbarride her, and they barride her again.

And she was like my dotter. 

Paper Planet

I awoke to find the world has flattened. The sky was dark blue, edged with bright orange, as if someone had dipped the sleepy sky in an ocean of old sunlight. The scenery was nothing more than flat black cutouts against the horizon: trees stuffed with dreaming birds, toothpicks of telephone poles poking against the sky, and grain silos that grew into complex, menacing shapes as I drew closer.

Stripped of dimensionality, the silos could have been mining equipment, or cities on the moon. Earth had lost her familiarity. Dusk was settling over the planet, tucking shadows, light, and life away in bed. I was abroad in the world, hurtling through cold space in a small blue car as the old orange faded from the edges of the world.

Inside the car, my driver turned the pop music down while her boyfriend played Pokemon on his laptop. They whispered, not realizing I was awake. I leaned my forehead against the breath-frosted window; had they noticed the world was flat? Had anyone?

We turned sharply; the driver yelled softly in mock terror. The orange faded completely; in the blackness the sky and earth melted together. Bright red blinking lights formed a ribbon in space outside. They blinked for miles; we couldn’t see the end in either direction. Perhaps they were millions of landed alien ships whose drivers had become lost in the two dimensional, spaceless world of dusk. Perhaps they were wind turbines. I snuggled into my pillow and fell asleep again.

Next semester I'm taking creative writing, so I'm expecting posts to be more frequent. Most of what I've written this semester has been research papers and essay analysis This was written on the car ride home from Thanksgiving break. My only semi-creative piece was ten pages long, so it wouldn't have fit well in this format.