» Thu May 03, 2012 4:18 pm
I didn't write this, but I just read it and it is awesome.
Fits the theme quite rightly.
"Miss Smith" by William Trevor
One day Miss Smith asked James what a baby horse was called and James couldn't remember. He blinked and shook his head. He knew, he explained, but he just couldn't remember.
Miss Smith said:
"Well, well, James Machen doesn't know what a baby horse is called."
She said it loudly so that everyone in the classroom heard. James became very confused. He blinked and said:
'Pony, Miss Smith?'
'Pony! James Machen says a baby horse is a pony! Hands up everyone who knows what a baby horse is.'
All the right arms in the room, except James's and Miss Smith's, shot upwards. Miss Smith smiled at James.
James thought: 'I'll run away. I'll join the tinkers and live in a tent.'
'What's a baby horse called?' Miss Smith asked the class and the class shouted:
'Foal, Miss Smith.'
"A foal, James,' Miss Smith repeated. 'A baby horse is a foal, James dear.'
'I knew, Miss Smith. I knew but -'
Miss Smith laughed and the class laughed, and afterward nobody would play with James because he was so silly to think that a baby horse was a pony.
James was an optimist about Miss Smith. He thought it might be different when the class went on their summer picnic or sat tightly together at the Christmas party, eating cake and biscuits and having their mugs filled from big enamel jugs. But it never was different. James got left behind when everyone was racing across the fields at the picnic and Miss Smith had to wait impatiently, telling the class that James would have to have his legs stretched. And at the party she heaped his plate with seed-cake because she imagined, so she said, that he was the kind of child who enjoyed such fare.
Once James found himself alone with Miss Smith in the classroom. She was sitting at her desk correcting some homework. James was staring in front of him, admiring a fountain pen that the day before his mother had bought for him. James was staring in front of him, admiring a fountain pen that the day before his mother had bought for him. It was a small fountain pen, coloured purple and black and white. James believed it to be elegant.
It was very quiet in the classroom. Soundlessly Miss Smith's red pencil ticked and crossed and underline.
Without looking up, she said: 'Why don't you go out and play?'
'Yes, Miss Smith,' said James. He walked to the door, clipping his pen into his pocket. As he turned the handle he heard Miss Smith utter a sound of irritation. He turned and saw that the point of her pencil had broken.
'Miss Smith, you may borrow my pen. You can fill it with red ink. It's quite a good pen.'
James crossed the room and held out his pen. Miss Smith unscrewed the cap and prodded at the paper with the nib.
'What a funny pen, James!' She said. 'Look, it can't write.'
'There's no ink in it,' James explained, 'You've got to fill it with red ink, Miss Smith.'
But Miss Smith smiled and handed the pen back. 'What a silly boy you are to waste your money on such a poor pen!'
'But I didn't -'
'Come along now, James, aren't you going to lend me your pencil-sharpener?'
'I haven't got a pencil-sharpener, Miss Smith.'
'No pencil-sharpener? Oh James, James, you haven't got anything, have you?'
When Miss Smith married she stopped teaching, and James imagined he had escaped her for ever. But the town they lived in was a small one and they often met in the street or in a shop. And Miss Smith, who at first found marriage rather boring, visited the school quite regularly. 'How's James?' she would say, smiling alarmingly at him. 'How's my droopy old James?'
When Miss Smith had been married for about a year she gave birth to a son, which occupied her a bit. He was a fine child, eight pounds six ounces, with a good long head and blue eyes. Miss Smith was delighted with him, and her husband, a solicitor, complimented her sweetly and bought cigars and drinks for all his friends. In time, mother and son were seen daily taking the air: Miss Smith on her trim little legs and the baby in his frilly pram. James, meeting the two, said: 'Miss Smith, may I see the baby?' But Miss Smith laughed and said that she Was not Miss Smith any more. She wheeled the pram rapidly away, as though the child within it might be affected by the proximity of the other.
'What a dreadful little boy that James Machen is,' Miss Smith reported to her husband. 'I feel so sorry for the parents.'
'Do I know him? What does the child look like?'
'Small, dear, like a weasel wearing glasses. He quite gives me the creeps.'
Almost without knowing it, James developed a compulsion about Miss Smith. At first it was quite a simple compulsion: just that James had to talk to God about Miss Smith every night before he went to sleep, and try to find out from God what it was about him that Miss Smith so despised. Every night he lay in bed and had his conversation, and if once he forgot it James knew that the next time he met Miss Smith she would probably say something that might make him drop down dead.
After about a month of conversation with God James discovered he had found the solution. It was so simple that he marvelled he had never thought of it before. He began to get up very early in the morning and pick bunches of flowers. He would carry them down the street to Miss Smith's house and place them on a window-sill. He was careful not to be seen, by Miss Smith or by anyone else. He knew that if anyone saw him the plan couldn't work. When he had picked all the flowers in his own garden he started to pick them from other people's gardens. He became rather clever at moving silently through the gardens, picking flowers for Miss Smith.
Unfortunately, though, on the day that James carried his thirty-first bunch of blooms to the house of Miss Smith he was observed. He saw the curtains move as he reached up to lay the flowers on the window-sill. A moment later Miss Smith, in her dressing-gown, had caught him by the shoulder and pulled him into the house.
'James Machen! It would be James Machen, wouldn't it? Flowers from the creature, if you please! What are you up to, you dozy James?'
James said nothing. He looked at Miss Smith's dressing-gown and thought it was particularly pretty: blue and woolly, with an edging of silk.
'You've been trying to get us into trouble,' cried Miss Smith. 'You've been stealing flowers all over the town and putting them at our house. You're an underhand child, James.'
James stared at her and then ran away.
After that, James thought of Miss Smith all the time. He thought of her face when she had caught him with the flowers, and how she had afterwards told his father and nearly everyone else in the town. He thought of how his father had had to say he was sorry to Miss Smith, and how his mother and father had quarrelled about the affair. He counted up all the things Miss Smith had ever said to him, and all the things she had ever done to him, like giving him seed-cake at the Christmas party. He hadn't meant to harm Miss Smith, as she said he had. Giving people flowers wasn't unkind; it was to show them you liked them and wanted them to like you.
'When somebody hurts you,' James said to the man who came to cut the grass, 'what do you do about it?'
'Well,' said the man, 'I suppose you hurt them back.'
'Supposing you can't,' James argued.
'Oh, but you always can. It's easy to hurt people.'
'It's not, really,' James said.
'Look,' said the man, 'all I've got to do is reach out and give you a clip on the ear. That'd hurt you.'
'But I couldn't do that to you because you're too big. How d'you hurt someone who's bigger than you?'
"It's easier to hurt people who are weaker. People who are weaker are always the ones who get hurt.'
'Can't you hurt someone who is stronger?'
The grass-cutter thought for a time.
'You have to be cunning to do that. You've got to find the weak spot. Everyone has a weak spot.'
'Have you got a weak spot?'
'I suppose so.'
'Could I hurt you on your weak spot?'
'You don't want to hurt me, James.'
'No, but just could I?'
'Yes, I suppose you could.'
'Well then?'
'My little daughter's smaller than you. If you hurt her, you see, you'd be hurting me. It'd be the same, you see.'
'I see,' said James.
All was not well with Miss Smith. Life, which had been so happy when her baby was born, seemed now to be directed against her. Perhaps it was that the child was becoming difficult, going through a teething phase that was pleasant for no one; or perhaps it was that Miss Smith recognized in him some trait she disliked and knew that she would be obliged to watch it develop, powerless to intervene. Whatever the reason, she felt depressed. She often thought of her teaching days, of the big square schoolroom with the children's models on the shelves and the pictures of kings on the walls. Nostalgically, she recalled the feel of frosty air on her face as she rode her bicycle through the town, her mind already practising the first lesson of the day. She had loved those winter days: the children stamping their feet in the playground, the stove groaning and crackling, so red and so fierce that it had to be penned off for safety's sake. It had been good to feel tired, good to bicycle home, shopping a bit on the way, home to tea and the wireless and an evening of reading by the fire. It wasn't that she regretted anything; it was just that now and again, for a day or two, she felt she would like to return to the past.
'My dear,' Miss Smith's husband said, 'you really will have to be more careful.'
'But I am. Truly I am. I'm just as careful as anyone can be.'
'Of course you are. But it's a difficult age. Perhaps, you know, you need a holiday.'
'But I've had difficult ages to deal with for years -'
'Now now, my dear, it's not quite the same, teaching a class of kids.'
'But it shouldn't be as difficult. I don't know -'
'You're tired. Tied to a child all day long, every day of the week, it's no joke. We'll take an early holiday.'
Miss Smith did feel tired, but she knew that it wasn't tiredness that was really the trouble. Her baby was almost three, and for two years she knew she had been making mistakes with him. Yet somehow she felt that they weren't her mistakes: it was as though some other person occasionally possessed her: a negligent, worthless kind of person who was cruel, almost criminal, in her carelessness. Once she had discovered the child crawling on the pavement beside his pram: she had forgotten apparently to attach his harness to the pram hooks. Once there had been beads in his pram, hundreds of them, small and red and made of glass. A woman had drawn her attention to the danger, regarding curiously the supplier of so unsuitable a plaything. 'In his nose he was putting one, dear. And may have swallowed a dozen already. It could kill a mite, you know.' The beads were hers, but how the child had got them she could not fathom. Earlier, when he had been only a couple of months, she had come into his nursery to find an excited cat scratching at the clothes of his cot; and on another occasion she had found him eating a turnip. She wondered if she might be suffering from some kind of serious absent-mindedness, or blackouts. Her doctor told her, uncomfortingly, that she was a little run down.
'I'm a bad mother,' said Miss Smith to herself; and she cried as she looked at her child, warm and pretty in his sleep.
But her carelessness continued and people remarked that it was funny in a teacher. Her husband was upset and unhappy, and finally suggested that they should employ someone to look after the child. 'Someone else?' said Miss Smith. 'Someone else? Am I then incapable? Am I so wretched and stupid that I cannot look after my own child? You speak to me as though I were half crazy.' She felt confused and sick and miserable. The marriage teetered beneath the tension, and there was no question of further children.
Then there were two months without incident. Miss Smith began to feel better; she was getting the hang of things; once again she was in control of her daily life. Her child grew and flourished. He trotted nimbly beside her, he spoke his own language, he was wayward and irresponsible, and to Miss Smith and her husband he was intelligent and full of charm. Every day Miss Smith saved up the sayings and doings of this child and duly reported them to her husband. 'He is quite intrepid,' Miss Smith said, and she told her husband how the child would tumble about the room, trying to stand on his head. 'He has an aptitude for athletics,' her husband remarked. They laughed that they, so unathletic in their ways, should have produced so physically lively an offspring.
'And how has our little monster been today?' Miss Smith's husband asked, entering the house one evening at his usual time.
Miss Smith smiled, happy after a good, quiet day. 'Like gold,' she said.
Her husband smiled too, glad that the child had not been a nuisance to her and glad that his son, for his own sake, was capable of adequate behaviour. 'I'll just take a peep at him,' he announced, and he ambled off to the nursery.
He sighed with relief as he climbed the stairs, thankful that all was once again well in the house. He was still sighing when he opened the nursery door and smelt gas. It hissed insidiously from the unlit fire. The room was sweet with it. The child, sleeping, svcked it into his lungs.
The child's face was blue. They carried him from the room, both of them helpless and inadequate in the situation. And then they waited, without speaking, while his life was recovered, until the moment when the doctor, white-coated and stern, explained that it had been a nearer thing than he would wish again to handle.
'This is too serious,' Miss Smith's husband said. 'We cannot continue like this. Something must be done.'
'I cannot understand -'
'It happens too often. The strain is too much for me, dear.'
Every precaution had been taken with the gas-fire in the nursery. The knob that controlled the gas pressure was a key and the key was removable. Certainly, the control point was within the child's reach but one turned it on or off, slipped the key out of its socket and placed it on the mantelpiece. That was the simple rule.
'You forgot to take out the key,' Miss Smith's husband said. In his mind an idea took on a shape that frightened him. He shied away, watching it advance, knowing that he possessed neither the emotional nor mental equipment to fight it.
'No, no, no,' Miss Smith said. 'I never forget it. I turned the fire off and put the key on the mantelpiece. I remember distinctly.'
He stared at her, drilling his eyes into hers, hopelessly seeking the truth. When he spoke his voice was dry and weary.
'The facts speak for themselves. You cannot suggest there's another solution?'
'But it's absurd. It means he got out of his cot, turned the key, returned to bed and went to sleep.'
'Or that you turned off the fire and idly turned it on again.'
'I couldn't have; how could I?'
Miss Smith's husband didn't know. His imagination, like a pair of calipers, grasped the ugly thought and held it before him. The facts were on its side, he could not ignore them: his wife was deranged in her mind. Consciously or otherwise she was trying to kill their child.
'The window,' Miss Smith said. 'It was open when I left it. It always is, for air. Yet you found it closed.'
'The child certainly could not have done that. I cannot see what you are suggesting.'
'I don't know. I don't know what I'm suggesting. Except that I don't understand.'
'He is too much for you, dear, and that's all there is to it. You must have help.'
'We can't afford it.'
'Be that as it may, we must. We have the child to think of, if not ourselves.'
'But one child! One child cannot be too much for anyone. Look, I'll be extra careful in future. After all, it is the first thing like this that has happened for ages.'
'I'm sorry, dear. We must advertise for a woman.'
'Please -'
'Darling, I'm sorry. It's no use talking. We have talked enough and it has got us nowhere. This is something to be sensible about.'
'Please let's try again.'
'And in the meanwhile? In the meanwhile our child's life must be casually risked, day in, day out?'
'No, no.'
Miss Smith pleaded, but her husband said nothing further. He pulled hard on his pipe, biting it between his jaws, unhappy and confused in his mind.
Miss Smith's husband did indeed advertise for a woman to see to the needs of their child, but it was, in fact, unnecessary in the long run to employ one. Because on his third birthday, late in the afternoon, the child disappeared. Miss Smith had put him in the garden. It was a perfectly safe garden: he played there often. Yet when she called him for his tea he did not come; and when she looked for the reason she found that he was not there. The small gate that led to the fields at the back of the house was open. She had not opened it; she rarely used it. Distractedly, she thought he must have managed to release the catch himself. That is quite impossible,' her husband said. 'It's too high and too stiff.' He looked at her oddly, confirmed in his mind that she wished to be rid of her child. Together they tramped the fields with the police, but although they covered a great area and were out for most of the night they were unsuccessful.
When the search continued in the light of the morning it was a search without hope, and the hopelessness in time turned into the fear of what discovery would reveal. 'We must accept the facts,' Miss Smith's husband said, but she alone continued to hope. She dragged her legs over the wide countryside, seeking a miracle but finding neither trace nor word of her child's wanderings.
A small boy, so quiet she scarcely noticed him, stopped her once by a sawmill. He spoke some shy salutation, and when she blinked her eyes at his face she saw that he was James Machen. She passed him by, thinking only that she envied him his life, that for him to live and her child to die was proof indeed of a mocking Providence. She prayed to this Providence, promising a score of resolutions if only all would be well.
But nothing was well, and Miss Smith brooded on the thought that her husband had not voiced. I released the gate myself. For some reason I have not wanted this child. God knows I loved him, and surely it wasn't too weak a love? Is it that I've loved so many other children that I have none left that is real enough for my own? Pathetic, baseless theories flooded into Miss Smith's mind. Her thoughts floundered and collapsed into wretched chaos.
'Miss Smith,' James said, 'would you like to see your baby?'
He stood at her kitchen door, and Miss Smith, hearing the words, was incapable immediately of grasping their meaning. The sun, reflected in the kitchen, was mirrored again in the child's glasses. He smiled at her, more confidently than she remembered, revealing a silvery wire stretched across his teeth.
'What did you say?' Miss Smith asked.
'I said, would you like to see your baby?'
Miss Smith had not slept for a long time. She was afraid to sleep because of the nightmares. Her hair hung lank about her shoulders, her eyes were dead and seemed to have fallen back deeper into her skull. She stood listening to this child, nodding her head up and down, very slowly, in a mechanical way. Her left hand moved gently back and forth on the smooth surface of her kitchen table.
'My baby?' Miss Smith said. 'My baby?'
'You have lost your baby,' James reminded her.
Miss Smith nodded a little faster.
'I will show you,' James said.
He caught her hand and led her from the house, through the garden and through the gate into the fields. Hand in hand they walked through the grass, over the canol bridge and across the warm, ripe meadows.
'I will pick you flowers,' James said and he ran to gather poppies and cowparsley and blue, beautiful corn-flowers.
'You give people flowers,' James said, 'because you like them and you want them to like you.'
She carried the flowers and James skipped and danced beside her, hurrying her along. She heard him laughing; she looked at him and saw his small weasel face twisted into a merriment that frightened her.
The sun was fierce on Miss Smith's neck and shoulders. Sweat gathered on her forehead and ran down her cheeks. She felt it on her body, tightening her clothes to her back and thighs. Only the child's hand was cool, and beneath her fingers she assessed its strength, wondering about its history. Again the child laughed.
On the heavy air his laughter rose and fell; it quivered through his body and twitched lightly in his hand. It came as a giggle, then a breathless spasm; it rose like a storm from him; it rippled to gentleness; and it pounded again like the firing of guns in her ear. It would not stop. She knew it would not stop. As they walked together on this summer's day the laughter would continue until they arrived at the horror, until the horror was complete.
Hall of Fame 
and yes, the requirements are that you write a short, fallout related story pertaining to the theme and then wait for the end of the month to see if you win. If you do win, then you get to pick the theme for the next month and get your name and story in the hall of fame.
