By Dean Hel
The boy’s face hovers over the table as if answers might drop down-–plick! plock!--to stain the paper. The distance between his clenched teeth and the sheet in front of it is minimal. Had there been any moisture left inside his cheeks, the paper would be drenched. As it is, though, nothing comes out of there but the driest of dust-devils, a sirocco so arid it dries the page even further.
It pushes away the eraser droppings from the table and they fall on the ground. I can never find them, the droppings, even when I press by face onto the hard floor to look. They must fall in the spaces between the tiles. There must be a whole mountain of them under our feet by now, the soft crumbs of wrong answers. Sometimes I fancy one of the boys or girls or kids will fall in there too, but it’ll be a soft fall, a cushioned fall, just before they sink into the soft mass of what was once a soft rubbery-pink eraser. A pumice smothering.
(Or else the cleaning lady who comes at night collects them in the sole of her clogs and drops them one by one in the streets of the city, keeping only the best ones to herself.)
This boy, he’s spent so much time looking down at the desk his irises have drooped and they stick to his glasses in long thin strips of black chewing gum. The nose pimples can barely hold on to the weight of those glasses. A Barbie-doll chin is this kid’s last hope for a face, but I can’t even look at that chin. The mouth hides there and it sputters on its back, its little legs kicking in the air, desperate to right itself out.
I glance away but everywhere there are fists clenched tight around pencils, and fingernails digging grooves into cuticles, and the sour yellow smell of sweaty necks. These visions pull at my eyes until I’m dizzy from it, until I must stare down like a penitent.
I am a penitent. I kneel at the altar of false promises. Worse, I am a preacher. The promises? That it all be okay, as long as they keep at it. That it will stop one day. That what they must do, everyone in the entire world has always done.
This boy, he’s in my flock. What I take from him he gives willingly. He’d give me his entire heart, if I asked: he’d pull at his tongue until the whole mess of it came out, the esophagus and the lungs and the spleen and the liver, all of it unspooling at my feet until the small sad sack of it would be revealed. And I could pick it up gently in my hands or I could stomp on it with the heel of my boot, but the truth is, it wouldn’t matter. I couldn’t put it back.
I stand at the pulpit and all eyes jump to me. Only the boy won’t look at me. The glasses have fallen down and they took the button nose with it, and, defenseless, the mouth-bug disappeared under the table. Unable to think of what else to do now, his face continues to stare down at his paper and he caresses it up and down, right and left, trying to make it show just what it’s supposed to show.
But his fingertip only sheds flecks of skin. Soon there’s a small hill of them, and he keeps rubbing. By the time I take the paper from under him, his index ends at the knuckle. I dream about collecting all those pieces of him. I’d put them in a baggie and Mod Podge them back to his body with a popsicle stick, make a collage of a boy.
Instead I put my hand upon his sugarcube neck, rub in there more promises–you did your best, it doesn’t matter, you’ll do better next time.
Dean Hel is a writer and educator based in Houston, Texas. Their work has appeared in Assignment Literary Magazine and Five on the Fifth. They are perpetually at work on a novel. Send them missives at dean.hel.writer@gmail.com.
