Red state #5: The School That Was Blown Away

The school stood in the middle of a meadow at the edge of town. No

one knew how long it had been there or who had built it. It was made

of brick and had a copper roof gone green in the weather. Somehow

it had come to life and nobody questioned why.

There was also a teacher. He was not old, but could not have been

very young, for the straw-color of his hair had grey flecks in the light.

He spoke rarely though it seemed clear what he asked

for. And the children loved him. They came to school on foot, for very few people had any other way of moving. They walked together, holding hands,

their parents behind. In the morning the sun released

a gold shimmer across the grass that melted the nightly frost. In

the afternoon when the day had ended, the children spilled out

into the meadow and ran after one another, their laughter ringing.



Then one evening a wind came. Slight at first, then stronger. It became

something that blew the shutters off their hinges, slammed windows

left ajar with great violence. All the parents gathered their children together, bolted

the doors. Lay down on the floor beneath the kitchen table to stay

clear of the shattering glass. It suddenly seemed like an angry

world where it hadn’t before.  An old man’s stutter returned for the first time in years.

A little girl was forever turned by what she thought was the

end of her life, though she continued to live. A woman closed

her eyes and was terrified of her own vision.



They worried about the schoolteacher in the meadow who lived there alone.

The wind raged that long night. And as suddenly as it

came, it departed, and when it did, it made a sound like a person

gasping for a last breath of air. They shuddered. They walked out
into the light to see what the wind had wrought.



The sky was a scoured blue. The people stood as though rooted

to the spot. A boy began walking toward the meadow. It was some distance

down the only road and most of the fences were down.

A few cows and goats wandered in the dirt, somehow no worse for

wear. The boy continued walking and could feel his heart

beating beneath his shirt. Other children peeked out of

their houses, fell in line. They walked together;

they did not hold hands. They moved toward the school

though they already knew. And when they got to the meadow it

was clear. Not a thing remained; not a brick or a desk, a sliver

of glass or piece of chalk. No sign of a footprint in the grass,

the blades unbent and unbroken.

The teacher nowhere

to be found.



The children stood where the school had been and began to weep.

Tears fell in the meadow, and no one tried to stop them.

They stood and cried, never moving,

not coming home for dinner, never coming in. And the parents

let them stay where they were,

to ache and grieve, knowing

it might keep them alive.

They must have shed a sea

of tears and the earth, thirsting, drank them all.



None of them remains. Though

there is still a meadow where nothing stands.

Strange things have happened there—a man

found a flower that smelled the same as his dead

grandmother’s blanket he wrapped himself in when

he was very young and had run away from home, and a woman, years later,

found a note hastily scrawled with the exact departure

time and destination of a train she had taken

to see her sister dying in a hospital in a big city

in the north. It looked written in her own

hand. Though she couldn’t say

for sure and there was no one

left to tell.