Mrs. Hatch is a slouch-shouldered, boulder-footed ogre. When she writes on the board, chalk shrieks and crumbles. Her voice is deep and moist, sonorous, an abandoned, slime-slick well with something unspeakable at the bottom. If there even is a bottom. Not a well you’d entrust with your precious coin, your secret wish. Dead flies pepper her windowsills.
At recess, Angela and I sit in the forked maple, knees touching, hers immaculate in white tights and mine mottled with scabbing scrapes and Band-Aid residue, whispering what we know about Mrs. Hatch. Her feet are toeless slabs of putrid flesh; her shoes are stuffed with dirt and earthworms. She keeps a human heart in a Baggie inside her purse, gnawing at it in the teacher’s lounge to maintain her (barely) human form. She lumbers through the halls at night, rattling doors, searching for unlocked classrooms with hamsters or guinea pigs, and when she finds one, she chomps off its head, slurps its innards, crunches its tiny, brittle bones between her yellowed teeth. Sometimes she makes do with goldfish. She doesn’t like iguanas: too dry, too green.
Angela supplies the bloodiest details – she has older brothers and knows things – but after recess, I’m the one who creeps back to Mrs. Hatch’s shady lair, while Angela skips across the hall to the other third-grade class. Her classroom is bright and warm, windows open to the smile of spring breezes. A plant twirls in the corner, flowers like bell-skirted fairies cascading over the edge of the pot.
Karen M, who lives on Angela’s street, waits by their classroom door. She doesn’t say hi to me, just grabs Angela’s hand and pulls her inside. They wear the same sparkly nail polish. Both have charm bracelets, tiny talismans tinkling on their wrists: ballet slippers, hearts, crowns. Both bring food from home, packed in rainbow unicorn lunch boxes, while I wait in line with the other free-lunch kids. Both have the long, shiny hair I crave, sometimes in intricate French braids with ribbons. My mom doesn’t have time for that and chops at mine with kitchen shears. Pixie cut, she calls it, but I look more like a lost boy.
Standing outside after school, last as always to be picked up. Mrs. Hatch on duty, prowling by the door. Angela waving, low and quick, as she climbs into Karen M’s mom’s car. Karen M thinks she’s Angela’s best friend but she can’t be because I am, at least this year, even when we’re separated by that hallway between light and dark, even when Angela’s nibbling a still-warm cookie handed over the back seat by Karen M’s mom and I’m out here with Mrs. Hatch and the sinking sun.
Even though everyone seems to know we’re destined for different stories.
Mrs. Hatch rummages in her handbag. Her stomach must be growling. I hope there’s enough heart left.
I’m an iguana. I stare at the street, shivering, willing my mom to appear. Too dry, too green. It’s the next car, I tell myself. Okay, the next one. The one after that. If I hold my breath. If I close my eyes. If I don’t cry. If I stop crying. One of these times I have to be right.
Didi Wood’s stories appear in SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Fractured Lit, Okay Donkey, and elsewhere. Her work has been chosen for the Wigleaf Top 50 and nominated for Best Small Fictions. Often she is festooned with cats. More at didiwood.com.
Lost Balloon 