“Recess”

by Stephen Lochton Kincaid

          Fifteen minutes after the second bell, Julie Reynolds began to panic. 

          By now, her classroom should have been packed with fifth-graders, heads bent studiously over the well-worn and sometimes frighteningly outdated pages of their social studies textbooks, Windows to the World, (in this book, Bill Clinton’s second term was perpetually “looking bright”), reading along silently while she read aloud.  There would be some whispers and giggles and note-passes, of course, it was right after recess, after all (and truth be told Miss Reynolds had never been known as a strict disciplinarian, regardless), but they should have all been there, occupying their seats.

          Instead, the room was empty.  Well, almost empty.  Toby Farks was still there, but the mooning, asthma-afflicted Toby Farks was always there.  The afternoon recess was Julie’s designated teacher’s break and she had traded her breaks all semester to keep an eye on Toby.  His face was buried in some science fiction book with a lurid cover.  She could see flakes of dandruff tangled in his unkempt hair.  This year, the other children had picked up the chant Toby Farks eats his farts!  and it followed him around the school like an anthem.  She often didn’t know what to do with the boy – whether she should feel sorry for him and his doomed childhood, or whether she should shove his pasty, grubby body outside into the sunlight – but today she felt oddly comforted by his presence.

          Even the hallway was ominously silent.  She went to the window, but that was pointless.  Her classroom looked out over the parking lot of Harmon Elementary, which was filled with plenty of second and third-hand automobiles, but completely devoid of any signs of life.

          “Miss Reynolds?” Toby asked, and she almost jumped.  The words rang flat; they hung unnaturally in the stillness. 

          “Yes, Toby?”

          “Where is everybody, Miss Reynolds?” His eyes were huge and insectoid behind his glasses.

          “I don’t know, Toby, but I’m going to find out.” She went to the door, satisfied she was walking more calmly than she felt.  “Stay here, Toby,” she said, and, before she could fully think about it, “If you hear anything, run to the principal’s office as fast as you can.” The door latched shut behind her with a sharp finality.

          Now what was that supposed to mean?  she thought, but in the back of her mind she already knew.  School shooting.  It was the dread boogeyman of every teacher these days, and although Harmon was just a small elementary school in a small rural town, and although nothing like that had ever happened here before, it was still possible.  Just last year a boy had been expelled for bringing his father’s handgun to school.  He was just showing off to his friends, no one had been hurt – it wasn’t even loaded, thank God – but the possibility was still there.

          Don’t be stupid, she told herself, you didn’t hear any gunshots.  This infallible logic, however, was quickly followed by the voice of her inner child, wheedling and unreasonable (but completely irrefutable): But still…

          In the hallway, the silence became a palpable thing that inexplicably gained weight, pressing down around her.  Her shoes clacked against the pearl-white linoleum and she blushed self-consciously.  She couldn’t help it.  She peered into the windows of several classrooms, frowning at the empty desks, many with pencils and textbooks still laid out on scuffed desktops.  Backpacks hung on coat racks like dried animal skins.  These rooms gave off an air of long-abandonment that made her think nervously of lost civilizations. 

          It was barely one hundred feet between her classroom and the playground exit, but by the time she reached the double fire doors, her heart was pounding.  She paused, her hands clutching the cold metal push bar so tight her knuckles had gone white.  She forced herself to take a deep breath.  Then she opened the door.

          At first, stepping from that artificial world of air-conditioning and dim fluorescent lighting into the world of sunshine and fresh air, she couldn’t see a thing.  The sun was a merciless white ball in a pale blue sky.  Sunspots floated in front of her eyes.  She cupped her hand on her brow, blinked away the floaters, then let her breath out in one big gush.  She hadn’t even realized she was still holding it.

          They were all here.  They were all still on the playground.

          She smiled.  It was an embarrassed smile, but also a relieved smile.  Mostly relieved.  The bell just hadn’t rung outside, and was that so surprising?  There had been budget cuts last year – painful budget cuts – and one of the district maintenance techs had been laid off.  Now it was just Abe Detler, who wore biballs and carried a wooden toolbox around, as if he were eighty instead of fifty.  He was competent enough, but he was stretched very thin driving between eight different schools and one admin building. 

          “Just one of the perks of teaching in a dying Midwest town,” Julie muttered, sighing.  She enjoyed her job, really she did, but sometimes–

          The smile slowly dried up.  A small “o” of confused astonishment took its place.

          No one was moving.

          It was something that took a minute to really sink in, to pass between that eye-brain barrier.  Part of it, she knew, was her own desire and expectation to see normalcy.  In fact, she was dismayed to find that her mind had even supplied screams and shouts and laughter to go along with those normal images of children at play.  (Later, she would wonder how often this happened.  How often did a person witness something strange and unnatural during the regular course of their lives but the brain simply refused to process it?  Patched it up with some cheap CGI effects and moved on?) The other part of it was the fact that everything else was moving.  A light breeze ruffled clothes and pushed a few gauzy clouds across the sky.  In the east, a hawk wheeled over the browned grasses of a late summer field.  Flags rustled on the flagpole.  Yet, for the teachers and children on the Harmon Elementary school playground, on this hot September day, time seemed to have come a grinding halt.  They were motionless as statues.

          Julie looked around, bewildered.

          Two boys were at a tetherball pole, their arms raised up to slap the peeling yellow ball.  Only the ball was at waist-level now, dangling uselessly from the line.

          By the edge of the blacktop, three girls were playing double-dutch.  The rope-twirlers held a slack jump rope in each fist.  The jumping girl, Julie realized, had frozen mid-hop.  She was laying on her side now, one leg thrust out and the other knee-up, her skirt rucked up high enough to see a blue crescent of her underpants.

          Dale Conyers, one of the third-grade teachers, was standing in the middle of the asphalt.  He was a short, pudgy man with a fringe of curly brown hair circling his otherwise bald head.  The kids (and some of the teachers, behind his back of course) called him Dale the Snail.  His hands were on his hips, his cheeks were puffed out, and there was a gleaming silver whistle plugged between his lips.  It was a comical sight.  That is, until one noticed the strawberry sunburn blossoming on his face and bald pate.  Then it wasn’t so funny.  In thirty minutes, Julie estimated, the first blisters would begin to form.  An hour after that – definitely not more than two – and those blisters would split open, leaking viscous pus into his eyes, and then Dale Conyers was going to need a round of skin grafts.

          What the fuck happened here?  A wave of unreality washed over her.  In college, Julie had caught the flu – the real flu, not just a cold masquerading as the flu.  If her roommate had been home, Julie supposed she would have forced her to go to the hospital.  But her roommate had taken up temporary residence with her boyfriend (a drunk jock lout, in Julie’s humble opinion) and instead Julie had spent two days lying in bed, fully clothed, with all the blankets piled on top of her and the heat cranked up, still shivering, drifting in and out of a dazed semi-consciousness.  This was like that had been, like the wavery vision of a fever dream.  She reached out for the wall behind her to steady herself.  The cool, rough texture of the brick – the solidity of it – seemed to help.

          She needed answers.  She spotted one of her students, Hailey Duvall, standing nearby, frozen mid-conversation with another child, Sylvia Rodriguez, and walked over to them.  Tried to walk over to them.  The unreality hit her again and she felt as if she were walking in slow motion, that her legs were paddling through glue.  It took an eternity.

          As she moved closer, she saw glistening trails on both their faces.  Tears brimmed in their eyes.  The sun, she realized – their eyes had been open too long in the sun.  The realization was oddly drained of the panic and horror she should have felt.  Even her thoughts were slow now.

          “Hailey?” She didn’t like the weakness she heard in her own voice and tried again.  “Hailey?” Nothing.  She snapped her fingers in front of Hailey’s face and still got no reaction.  Not even a flicker in her watery brown eyes.  Julie touched Hailey’s arm, tentatively.  To her relief, the skin there was still soft and warm.  Somewhere in her subconscious, Julie found she had been half-expecting to touch the cold marble skin of a corpse in the morgue.

          Hailey’s arm was extended outward, lightly touching Sylvia’s shoulder in a friendly gesture.  Julie grabbed her wrist and pushed down.  It wouldn’t budge.  Although Hailey’s skin was soft and warm, her arm was the unyielding, inanimate handle of an old well pump that had rusted shut.  Julie pushed harder, and Hailey wobbled on her feet.  An image rose unbidden in her mind: Hailey’s arm breaking off and leaving a bloodless stump, like a department store mannequin, and Julie let go with a small squeal of disgust.

          She thought about calling 911.  In fact, her hand had crept numbly into the front pocket of her pants and now clutched the cell phone sitting there, relishing the comforting feel of its spongy rubber case.  But … what would she say?  Um, hi, I’m Julie Reynolds I’m a teacher at Harmon Elementary and I think that an alien spaceship flew over the playground and blasted everyone with a freeze ray!  Please send help!  Right.  She could hear the gales of laughter already. 

          Instead, she moved on.  The flags ruffled.  A few birds twittered overhead.  No one moved.  She wove around them, careful not to touch anyone.  She thought if she bumped someone and accidentally knocked them over, if she heard their soft but unyielding bodies hit the ground like a rotten log, she might just scream.  She might just howl at the sky like a lunatic.  She felt their faces watch her as she passed.  Were they moving behind her, quietly, just outside her field of vision?  She had the overwhelming sensation that they were, perhaps waving their hands or taking a furtive step, and she constantly had to fight the urge to wheel around and try to catch them in the act.

          Out past the blacktop, one of the kids had fallen off the jungle gym.  The way he was lying on his back in the sand with his hands curled up made Julie think vaguely of the plastic monkeys in a barrel game she had played as a child.  She had to tear her eyes away from this, from the unnatural sight of the boy staring vacantly into the sun.

          She was on the short rise overlooking the school before she even realized it.  She supposed she was suffering from some sort of low-grade shock but had no idea how to snap herself out of it.  Maybe the numbness was better anyway.  Maybe it was the only thing holding her sanity together.  There were a few kids up here, even though the kids weren’t allowed this far from the school, and she thought, You’ll have to go to the principal’s office for this.  She imagined stacking them on a cart and pulling them down the hill back to the school and uttered a short bark of laughter that quickly turned into a painful acid burp.

          When she walked past the big oak tree at the top of the rise, she thought she saw movement and whirled.  Finding Donna Morris standing there did nothing to ease Julie’s feeling of shock.  Donna Morris was the other third grade teacher.  The children adored her.  She was a big, fluffy, older woman who favored floral print dresses and had a booming laugh.  She wasn’t laughing now.  She had her hands held out in front of her as if she was warding something off.  Ants trundled freely up her bare arms.  Her face was a rictus of terror.  Julie, who had been dragged to Sunday school with her two brothers until she turned fourteen, thought this was what Lot’s wife must have looked like after she looked back at Sodom and got turned into a pillar of salt for her troubles.

          Julie studied her face, peering closely into those moveless eyes.  There was something there, she thought, something else besides fear.  Recognition?  Warning?  Julie wasn’t sure.  As she watched, a tear welled in Donna’s left eye, followed the glistening track on her face made by the countless tears that had come before it, and dropped into the dark patch blossoming on her dress.

          “Hi, Miss Reynolds!”

           Julie had to stifle a shriek when the boy stepped out from behind Donna Morris.  Her breath caught in her throat like a bird trapped in a stovepipe.  She took an involuntary step back and almost tripped over a half-buried tree root.

          She recognized the boy.  Of course she did, it was a small school, and teachers always knew who the troublemakers were.  Danny Blatchly.  He liked to light fires in trash cans and throw firecrackers at the girls.  Mean-spirited stuff that pushed the boundaries of being just a harmless prank.  She had sent him to the principal’s office herself once, when she caught him pushing a kid off the monkey bars. 

          A cold hand seemed to grasp the back of her neck.  He was just an ordinary kid, she thought – he had slightly buck teeth, mousy brown hair, and a spray of freckles across his forehead – but there was something about his grin and the tilt of his head right now that felt wrong, something mocking.  His eyes gleamed.  They seemed almost … fervent.

          “Danny!” she said.  “What are you doing out here?”

          Her mind supplied its own answer first in a child’s falsetto: Picking off stragglers, Miss Reynolds.

          “I learned a new trick,” Danny said.  He moved forward, so slowly it was almost imperceptible.  Slinking, Julie thought.  Go away, you little shit, I don’t want to see your trick, she wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t form.  In truth, she felt hypnotized by that slow movement.

          “We’re playing freeze tag, Miss Reynolds.  Wanna play?” There was laughter in the lilt of this question, but it was taunting and spiteful.

          If he hadn’t tripped over the very same root Julie had stumbled on, she might have been stuck on the hill with Donna Morris, she of the flower print dresses and the booming laugh, forever.  But when he sprawled at her feet and looked up at her with an expression of utter black hatred, her paralysis broke, and she turned and fled. 

          Although her high school track days were long behind her, and although she was wearing the wrong shoes for it (two-inch heels; in retrospect, a poor choice that), she outran him in a dead sprint.  Down the hill and back to the school.  She could hear – or imagined she heard – his footsteps pounding behind her the entire way.

          By the time she reached the school she was gasping for air and there was a terrific stitch in her side.  She burst into her classroom and tried to slam the door behind her, but Danny’s hand darted through, fingers waggling, a pale blind spider probing for her.  She gave a small shriek and threw her herself into the corner between the door and the wall.  Danny flew in a second later, momentarily pinning Julie behind the door.  Her brain, pumped full of adrenaline, had snapped out of the shock.  In fact, she could see everything with crystal clarity now: she was at eye-level with the bulletin board on the back wall and she could see the stipple holes from the thousands of thumbtacks pinned there over the decades.

          “Miss Reynolds?” Toby asked hesitantly.

          Toby – fuck!  She had forgotten about Toby!

          It was too late.  Danny had stopped in the middle of the room and was now looking at Toby, his head tilted in that mocking way.

          “Hey, you wanna play freeze tag?” he asked softly.

          Trapped behind the door, Julie could only watch it happen.  Would she have done something, otherwise?  She wanted to think so, but all that her mind could conjure up at this question later was that black look of hatred on Danny’s face, his fingers searching for her from around the door.  And so Toby never really stood a chance.  He was cringing at his desk, his fat lips quivering, when Danny darted forward and tapped his shoulder.

          There was no flash of light, no booming word from the voice of God.  Nothing so extraordinary.  It might have been her imagination, but Julie thought there was a slight crackle in the air, the same sensation you might have standing near an electric transformer.  Toby gave a slight shudder, a soft hiss of breath… and then he simply froze.  His eyes, swimming behind those Coke-bottle lenses, seemed to glaze over, uncomprehending.

          While Danny was admiring his handiwork, Julie bolted out the door.  The stitch in her side had turned into a white-hot spear of agony.  She couldn’t run anymore, and the relative safety of the principal’s office was too far away; she knew she couldn’t make it.  Instead, she threw herself into the janitor’s closet, hunkering down next to a dirty mop bucket and packs of toilet paper in the high reek of ammonia.  She realized she was whimpering uncontrollably and she clapped a hand over her mouth.

          Footsteps down the hall.  The rattle of a doorknob, then a door creaking open.  “Miss Rey-nolds!” Danny called.  Julie held her breath.

          More footsteps.  Through the crack under the door, she could see shadows move past.  She felt a small glimmer of hope.

          When the door flew open and Danny shouted triumphantly, “FREEZE!”, she did.  God help her, she did.  She couldn’t even let out a scream (which would have been some relief, at least), because her throat had jammed up and instead just emitted an ineffectual little croak.

          I should have closed my eyes, she thought wildly.

          The door snicked shut on his laughter.

          After a while, she began to wonder if the parents would find her when they came to pick up their children after school.  Then she had a terrible vision: a vast line of cars, stretching all the way from the school out to the highway.  The drivers, having been lured out of their cars by a distraught little boy, were now standing motionless in the hot sun, their eyes open and unblinking and uncomprehending.  She wanted to shudder, but couldn’t.   

How long would it take?  she wondered.  Leg cramps had started the first painful wave of fire in her legs.  How long would it take for their eyes to dry out and shrivel up, to turn into useless, deflated sacks in their skulls? 

          Crouching in the dark of the closet, with the first of her own tears streaming down her face, Julie Reynolds had a very long time to think about this.

Stephen Lochton Kincaid grew up in the flatlands of Kansas.  After spending most of his life there, he now lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he draws upon the lowering gray skies and primeval forests for inspiration to write the stuff of nightmares.