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Sixth Grade & The Teacher's RoomBy Mary Buchinger QuailBellMagazine.com Sixth Grade We sit shoulder to shoulder at the cafeteria tables no ordinary school lunch—the cooks are all mothers some of them ours, everything from scratch by women who can cook—to say no thanks even to the soup is a problem. Today it’s rice, floating white and curved among green fans of parsley, bright carrot chunks, caught in a savory broth, when Mr. Hinz calls our attention to the similarity between the cooked kernels and the hookworms we’d been discussing just before lunch. We girls, edgy as beveled glass, screech. Some reach for ketchup as if to drown those worms, but even then how like an intestine —the squirted stream, beginning to bleed into the urine yellow, growing as formless as a future where nothing can be thrown away, all of it coming together in stamens with anthers and fertilized pistils, like sixth grade science where everything is like something else, no innocent berry or cucumber, all a simile for something we have yet to learn. The Teacher's Room
The table— what’s not covered by boxes (labeled in black marker, “No contents. Not Kelly’s team,” stacked two stories high, blocking the light from the metal-meshed window) and manila envelopes entitled “Values Stars,” an empty tissue box, a 3-hole punch that calls itself “Citizen Schools” —hasn’t been washed with hot soapy water for years now. Students entering the sixth grade when this table was already old but first covered with the now-ratty blue and green and shreds of yellow contact paper, have since led full lives as janitors, printers, Viet Nam vets, clerks, professors, grandparents… And that is just the table. The wall (apple-sized-hole punched midway up) meets the floor (banker’s lamp green)-- gouge-marbled with wear and grease, with hastily heated cans of garbanzo beans, and peels of oranges, with spilled m & m’s —unsteadily, and with little heart or will. No one gathers here anymore. No paper in the copying machine, dismembered burners from the old brass stove balance barely on the un-plumbed sink. CommentsComments are closed.
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