Bentley Little - The House

She locked the doors, drew the drapes.

She dreamed that night of the girl, and in her dream the child was naked and in bed with her. She was kissing the girl on the lips, and those lips were soft and knowing, the girl's smooth body warm and deliciously sensual, the feel of her budding breasts achingly erotic.

Laurie had never been this aroused before, and though she became aware at some point that this was not real, that she was dreaming, she did not want it to end and she purposely tried to prolong the dream, to manipulate its specifics in order to draw it out. She was rubbing herself against the girl, feeling soft femininity between her legs, and she was wet, wetter than she had ever been in her life, her lubricating juices dripping down her thighs, smearing the skin between them. There was no penetration, but she was already reaching orgasm, and she bit her lip to keep from crying out, involuntary spasms wracking her body as wave after wave of pleasure coursed through her, spreading outward from between her legs.

When she awoke, her period had come.

Norton Fall had arrived early this year. It was the end of August and school had just started, but already the trees outside the classroom window were a red and yellow rainbow against the flat gray of the Iowa sky.

Norton Johnson hated to be inside on a day like today. It ran counter to every impulse in his body, and it was on days like this that he seriously considered taking the Board up on their offer and retiring.

There was no way he could retire, though. He turned back toward his class, stared out at the blank bored teenage faces before him. These kids needed him. They didn't know it, but they did. The other teachers in school might think of him as a dinosaur, a relic from an earlier age, but he knew that the only way these students would ever learn anything, the only way they would ever overcome the lax parenting and media overstimulation that was their world, was through someone who cared enough to hold their noses to the grindstone.

Straight teaching. That's what they needed. Lectures, note taking , reading, essays, tests. Not this "cooperative learning,"

not the current fads of the current educational "experts."

He'd been here before. In the late sixties, early seventies.

When teachers had "rapped" to their students.

When one of the English classrooms had had beanbag chairs and pillows instead of desks. When students had been allowed to design their own course curriculum and grade their own papers, giving themselves the scores they thought they deserved. He alone had resisted that foolishness, had insisted that there was nothing wrong with the tried and true methods of teaching to which he'd been subjected and that he'd been successfully using for years.

He'd been laughed at then, too. But those days had come. And they'd gone.

And he was still here.

The current educational fallacy was that facts and dates weren't important, that students were better off learning "concepts" rather than information, and he was determined to wait out this trend as well, to remain at the school, to continue on as department chairman until this too had passed.

Still . . .

He looked wistfully out the window. The air probably smelled like fireplace smoke. The slight breeze rattling the trees was probably brisk and cold.

He forced himself to continue on with his lecture.

The fact was, as much as he hated to admit it, his mind wandered more often these days than it had in the past. He was not senile or unfocused or unable to concentrate. It was not that. It was simply that his priorities now were different. Intellectually, his work remained paramount, but emotionally his needs were shifting. He no longer received the same satisfaction from teaching as he had before. He sometimes found himself wanting to gratify simpler, more basic desires.

The verities of old age.

Norton glanced up at the clock above the blackboard.

The period was winding down, so he gave a short talk on Mengele and Nazi experimentation and, as always, there was an appreciable increase in the level of attention paid by the class.

He attempted, as usual, to place the information in historical perspective, to give it some context, to impress on the kids why this subject was important. To make them think.

"We're facing the fallout even now," he said. "The Nazi experiments on human beings, onerous as they were, yielded valuable scientific information that could now be put to good use. Therein lies the dilemma. Is that knowledge tainted because of the way in which it was obtained? A lot of people believe that no good can come of evil and that recognition of the worth of this information would indirectly validate what the Nazis did. There are other people who believe that knowledge is knowledge, it is neither good nor evil in and of itself, and the method by which it was obtained should have no bearing on its validity. Still others believe that if any good can come of this evil, all of those people would not have died in vain. It's a complex question with no easy answer."

The bell rang.

"Think about it over the weekend. You may have to write an essay." He smiled as the students picked up their books and papers, groaning. "And enjoy your days off."

"We always do!" Greg Wass yelled as he sped out the door.

The weather was still gorgeous after school, and Norton cut across the football field to Fifth Street. At the edge of the field, in the dirt border adjoining the chain link fence that separated school property from the sidewalk, he saw a line of huge red ants marching from a hole in the ground to a discarded lunch sack, and he stopped for a moment to watch them. It had always seemed ironic to him that the ant, the Nazi of the insect kingdom, was the bug most frequently subjected to genocide.

Flies and gnats, spiders and beetles, were usually killed individually. But ants were squashed or sprayed with poison, killed a hundred, two hundred at a time, entire colonies wiped out in one stroke.

He frowned, recalling a memory from his childhood, when he and a neighbor girl had set fire to an anthill, dousing the small mound of dirt and the surrounding grassy ground with kerosene before dropping a match and watching the little insect bodies shrivel and blacken.

They'd thrown other bugs into the fire as well, beetles and spiders, whatever they could catch, and they'd almost tossed in a kitten but the flames had sputtered out before they could capture the animal.

He closed his eyes. Where had that memory come from?

He felt suddenly ill at ease, slightly queasy, and he took a deep breath and walked through the open gate onto the sidewalk. The day no longer seemed so perfect, and instead of strolling slowly, enjoying the cool weather and the premature season, he hurried down Fifth Street toward home.

Carole was cooking dinner in the kitchen when he arrived, but he wasn't in the mood to talk to her, so he called out a cursory greeting, threw his briefcase on the hall tree, grabbed a Newsweek from the magazine rack, and locked himself in the bathroom. He stayed in there for almost a half hour, until Carole knocked on the door and asked if he was going to spend the night on the toilet or come out and eat. He yelled that he'd be out in a minute, and when he walked into the dining room, the table was set and the good china was out. In the center of the table was a full salad bowl, a plate of mashed potatoes, and a small basket of rolls.

Uh-oh, he thought.

Carole emerged from the kitchen carrying a silver tray upon which sat a delicious-smelling roast.

"What is it?" he asked as she placed the tray on the table.

"What is what?"

"This." He gestured around the table. "What's up?"

"Nothing," she said. "I'm in a good mood and I

wanted to have a nice dinner. Is that a crime?"