James Van Pelt - Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille

Here, too, windows were broken, and the Venetian blinds hung askew. Morning sun slanted through the uneven slats. They pushed me toward my podium. I clung to the top, sick with fear. When would they kill me? Would I become like them?

They stumbled against the desks, former students, all of them: Daniel, who used to play his guitar at lunch; Lisa, with her pierced lip and blue-dyed hair; Landon, who read manga and drew big-breasted girls in the back of his notebooks, all my students. They bumped into the chairs, moaning low in their throats, until they were sitting, a terrible parody of the class they once had been.

What did they want, with their white-washed eyes and bruised faces? They looked at me, blank-faced, but ravenous, expectant, somehow. Hands gripped the sides of their desks. A breeze stirred a loose paper on the windowsill.

Finally, Joselyn, a girl who used to look like she ran a brush through her long, brunette hair a thousand strokes before she came to class, raised her hand, her hair a knotted mess, now, her blouse, torn and stained. She raised her hand and waited.

“Yes, Joselyn,” I squeaked.

She opened her mouth, and for a while nothing came except a strangled gasping, until she forced the word: “Braaaiiins.” Her hand dropped with a thud. “Braaaiiins.”

“That’s what you want?”

She nodded. They all nodded.

Was this what remained, after they died, after they reanimated? A desire to continue, to be a little bit of what they once were? Was it all habit? Would the athletes head to the gym after school to make layups? Would the marching band tramp across the field, their tuneless instruments dead in their grips?

Joselyn said, “Braaaiiins,” a third time.

I found a marker in the desk. What could be more surreal, but who was I after all? The world had ended. The apocalypse had arrived. Still, I was who I was. They were what they had become.

I turned to the board. “Today, I will show you how to diagram sentences.” I wrote on the white surface. I drew lines and made connections and spoke the arcane language of grammar. When I faced the class again, they were silent and attentive.

“Braaaiiins,” someone in the back groaned.

By the time the sun had traveled to the horizon, I’d filled the board and erased it a dozen times. It didn’t matter what I talked about. They didn’t answer questions. They didn’t move.

But they let me live.

Tomorrow I think I’ll teach literature. Some Dickenson, some Poe. Tomorrow I’ll teach to the dead and for the moment pretend that the world will go on.

Tomorrow they won’t have to drag me to school.

For as long as Poul could remember, he’d spent the summer at the lake where his brother drowned.

This year, as they climbed in the van, Leesa said cryptically, “Savannah is six.”

Poul held his hand on the ignition key but didn’t turn it. “I know.”

Each year since Savannah was born, it got harder to come out. The nightmares started earlier, grew more vivid, woke him with a scream choked down, a huge hurting lump he swallowed without voicing. Poul took longer to pack the van; he delayed the day he left, and when he finally started, he drove below the speed limit.

They pulled into the long, sloping driveway down to the cottage just after noon. Leesa had slept the last hour, and Savannah colored in the back seat, surrounded by baggage and groceries. Her head was down, very serious, turning a white sky into a blue one. She always struck Poul as a somber child, for six, as if there was something sad in her life that returned to her occasionally. Not that she didn’t smile or didn’t act silly at times, but he’d catch her staring out the window in her bedroom before she’d go to bed, or her hand would rest on a favorite toy without picking it up, and she seemed lost. She was quick to tears if either parent scolded her, which happened seldom, but even a spilled drink at dinner filled her eyes, the tears brimming at the edge, ready to slip away.

Their cottage sat isolated by a spur of nature conservancy land on one side and on the other by a long, houseless, rocky stretch. He bought the place fourteen years earlier, the year after he married, from Dad, who didn’t use it anymore.

Only a couple of hours from Terre Haute, Tribay Lake attracted a slower paced population; county covenants kept the skiers off, so the surface remained calm when the wind was low. From the air it looked like a three-leafed clover, with several miles of shoreline. An angler in a boat with a trolling motor could find plenty of isolated inlets covered with lily pads where the lunkers hung out.

By mid-June the water warmed to swimming temperature—inner tubes were stacked next to the boat house for a convenient float—and the nights cooled off for sleeping. Poul and Leesa took the front room overlooking the lake. In the first years they’d opened the big windows wide at night to listen to crickets. Lately, though, he went to bed alone while she worked crossword puzzles, or she retired early and was asleep by the time he got there.

Poul knew the lake by its smell and sounds—wet wood and fish and old barbeques, and waves lapping against the tires his dad had mounted on the pier to protect the boat, the late night birds trilling in the hills above the lake, and an echo of his mother’s voice, still ringing, when Neal didn’t come back. “Where’s your brother?” She’d asked, her eyes already wild. “Weren’t you watching Neal?” She called his name as she walked down the rocky shore looking for the younger son.

Savannah closed her book and said, “I’m going to catch a big fish this year. I’m going to see him in my raft first, then I’ll hook him. But I want to visit Johnny Jacobs and his kittens first.” Over Poul’s objection, Leesa had bought Savannah a clear bottomed raft, just big enough to hold a child, and it was all she’d talked about for weeks.

Poul said, “They won’t be kittens anymore, Speedy. That was last fall. They’ll be cats by now.” Gravel crunched under the wheels. Leesa didn’t move, her sweater still bunched between her head and the window.

Poul wondered if she only pretended to be asleep. It was a good way to not converse, and the lean against the window kept her as far away from him as possible. “We’re here, Leesa,” he said, touching her hand. She didn’t flinch, so maybe she actually had been sleeping.

Leesa rubbed her eyes, then pushed her short, black hair behind her ears. She’d started dying it last year even though Poul hadn’t noticed any gray. His hair had a couple of streaks now, but his barber told him it made him distinguished. At thirty-five, he thought “distinguished” was a good look.

“I’m going to walk down to Kettle Jack’s to see if he has fresh corn for the grill. I like grilled corn my first night at the lake,” Leesa said. Poul wondered if she was talking to him. She’d turned her face to the side, where the oak slipped past.

Poul pulled the car under the beat-up carport next to the cottage. Scrubby brush scraped against the bumper. Leesa opened the door and was gone before he could stop the engine. Savannah said, “I don’t like corn on the cob. Can we have hot dogs?”

“Sure, Speedy.” On an elm next to the cottage, a frayed rope dangled, its end fifteen feet from the ground. Summers and summers ago, there’d been a knot in the end and Neal hung on while Poul pushed him. “Harder, Poul!” he’d yell, and Poul gave another shove, sending the younger boy spinning. Poul looked at the rope. He didn’t remember when it had broken; it seemed like this was the first time he’d seen it in years. With the door open now, forest smells filled the car: the peculiar lakeside forest essence that was all moss and ferns and rotted logs half buried in loam, damp with Indiana summer dew. He and Neal had explored the woods from the cottage to the highway, a half-mile of deadfall and mysterious paths only the deer used. They hunted for walking sticks and giant beetles, or, with peanut butter jars in hand, trapped bulbous spiders for later examination.