Firetruck

By Malia Simon-- published novelist. The enclosed social system of the playground, seen through unassuming characters.

There was a big, broad oak tree through which the sun shone to project tiny speckles on the garage in the morning, but more importantly there was a boy called Evan.

He paused to glance at the speckles (because it was the case that he sometimes noticed them) before proceeding down the doorsteps and down the sidewalk as was predictable of him. It was his walk to school that put him in a watchful mood-- an almost selfless mood-- for a boy of his age. He liked to consider things and allow for their impression on him without much further contemplation. It was the grand practice of thought-removal. He might not have been fully aware of his doing this practice, but he was, and it made him (though perfectly accidentally) a selfless guy sometimes. If he were any older, he might have boasted and called it something of a godless asceticism.

For example, he let the sidewalk beneath him make itself known, Pollocked with blackened gum splatters as it was, but he didn’t think about it, really. He also did this to his neighbor’s mailbox, which looked like nothing more than a mailbox, which was okay.

The only problem was, Evan was miserably unattractive. He was third-generation ugly with a great big hook nose that had undergone a spate of iterations on his forefathers’ faces before reaching his. He had an eyebrow that drooped reluctantly over two greenish-brown eyes, greasy black curls, and a barely-visible chin-neck boundary. Sometimes he smiled, but it was only in a way that looked like a frown. On this day he did smile, because he saw the sun and the clouds and how promising they looked. They didn’t see him though, probably because they didn’t want to, since he really was so ugly. Even the grassy hillside seemed extra windswept with paranoid avoidance as he passed it then.

Luckily Evan didn’t notice this. What he did suddenly become keenly aware of was the weight of the paper-bagged lunch in his curled fingers. He felt glad he had remembered to grab his lunch from the counter, and he enjoyed the gladness for a few minutes, his brow peaking in its center ever-so-slightly. Evan liked to feel glad about things like that sometimes. It was just another version of the earlier practice; it was a soothing activity in that he could enjoy it while keeping himself just outside of it. Gladness isn’t much of a feeling, anyway.

When Evan rounded the corner and reached the crosswalk, he said hi to the crossing guard.

            “Hi,” Evan said.

            “Hello there, Evan,” said the crossing guard. Her name was Patty (or something like that), and she had fully gray hair which she chose to keep very long despite this, and she’d taken a particular liking to Evan ever since he was in Kindergarten. She walked him across the street.

            “The sun’s really out today, isn’t it?” she said, which would have been a trivial comment had it not been the case that Evan had noticed that exact item on his walk to school.

            “Yes!” he said, which made her smile. Evan enjoyed that he always somehow made her smile.

            “Have a good day at school today, kid,” she called after him, and he felt the warmth of it on his back. It was as if she had said “Happy birthday” or even just mentioned their shared experience of the sun again. He only permitted himself for a second to wonder if it was something she gave to every boy.

            Behind the chain-linked fence Jonas and Lee were stationed at the play structure.  Lee hung from the monkey-bars with his head tilted all the way back on his neck and his belly-button exposed. Jonas stood behind him in the sand, talking to his upside-down pupils. Both boys had yellowish little-boy hair except for Jonas’s was buzzed and Lee's shaggy.

            “Do it again,” Jonas said with an indulgent laugh.

            “Do what again?” Lee teased. Then he did it again, which meant he let his tongue hang way out to the side of his mouth and crossed his eyes as best he could.

            This made Jonas very happy, and he laughed a goofy laugh. Lee laughed too, and they rode the momentum together for a minute until Lee finally started to feel a little dizzy and had to come down.

            “Hey you know what would be funny,” Lee said.

            “What?”

            “What if I did that face all day,” he said, and they started up giggling again.

            “No, you know what would be funnier? What if you did this face all day!” Jonas said, and made an expression practically identical to the old one, only now it was funnier because it was three minutes later and also because he had said it was going to be.

Suddenly they noticed Evan with his brown paper bag and backpackless shoulders moving through the gate. To see him was nothing, really. What had particularly struck them was that they’d silently spotted him with almost identical timing, which was exceptionally titillating and impossible not to explore. 

“Hey Lee, you know what would be funny?” Jonas said.

“What.” And he giggled a hurried giggle.

“Go up to Weird Evan and ask him if he knows what word starts with an F and ends with a U-C-K.”

Lee grinned because he knew the joke but eyed Jonas because he didn’t know him. 

“I’m serious,” Jonas said, and he was. It was the sanctimonious mischief of the playground, to be serious about something a friend is challenged to do.

Lee grew silent yet still a little squirmy in the shoulders. He didn’t think of it that way, of course (as the sanctimonious mischief of the playground). However, perhaps on some level he did. For he scratched a spot on his left buttock, although it did not particularly itch.

Finally he whistled in Evan’s direction, because he knew how to whistle. Knowing how to whistle made him really cool and he liked to remind people of that. “Knowing how to whistle is really cool,” he’d say, or something like that, and people would usually believe him, if they were kids.

Lee's whistle caught Evan’s attention immediately, as things usually do. He paused his walking to look, motionless, and for a moment Lee and Jonas believed he would ignore them and continue on his trajectory to the classroom. If this were the case, Lee might’ve said “Typical of Weird Ev,” to which Jonas might have replied, “Yeah.”

But instead, for curiosity, for reciprocation, or for something else, Evan came.

He started toward them. It was an unmoving moment there despite the gap between them halving itself down to nothing. The group of two and the one were then, as if seen from space, only two round masses which a reducing distance linked and knitted together. The inertial quality of their merging made it so that no boy felt totally responsible, nor in control-- they were only the complementary pieces of nature’s puzzle. It was something like fate in motion, only if you believed in fate. Evan played grand old thought-removal. That is, he let himself be moved.  

When he was with them, Lee said:

“Hey Evan I bet you don’t know what word starts with an F and ends with a U-C-K.”

Jonas and Lee watched with matched grins while Evan moved his lips around in concentration, his brow unmoving.

“F…,” he said. “U-C-K,” he wondered, softly.

He looked up with a question in his eyes to meet Lee's, which were so blue

and lurid while they buzzed with anticipation. Beside him, Jonas was bubbling.

“Ffffff,” Evan sounded.

“So, what’s the word then?” Jonas said with a particular hunger that had

grabbed him. He sunk his teeth lightly into a pink puffy bottom lip and rubbed the blonde fuzz on top of his head.

Evan turned his head east and west. Mrs. Alexander was standing within

thirty feet from them with a necklaced whistle resting on her gut and a hand dug into her hip. Her dark sunglasses and slouched stillness made her look a slumbering playground shape.

Evan leaned forward and kept cautious eye contact while whispering:

“F**k?”

Jonas and Lee looked at each other with sputtering, close-to-satisfactory delight.

“What was it, Evan?” Jonas grinned, still hungry. He looked back at Mrs. Alexander, who was still but an amorphous shape.

“F**k,” Evan said plainly.

“No, that’s not it!” Lee cried.

Evan shifted with concern. He furrowed his brow and shuffled his black boots. Doing this let some sand into them through the lace holes, which he told himself he’d address later.

“F**k,” he said. “F-U-C-K f**k. It can only be f**k.”

It was then that the shape of Mrs. Alexander was activated into a life form.

She came in between where Evan and Lee and Jonas faced each other and stood strangely perpendicular to them, as if speaking to no boy, or to all boys, or to a boy somewhere far west of them all. Her voice was the only part of her that addressed Evan.

“Evan. What are those words?”

“The words are--,”

She blew her whistle, which Evan thought wasn’t entirely necessary.

“I don’t need to hear them again.”

“They told me to say it,” Evan pointed.

“That’s not what we told you to say, even!” Jonas said.

Evan leaned around Mrs. Alexander’s body to protest.

“Oh yeah? What is it then?”

 “You have to keep guessing!” Lee said, and in Jonas’s opinion it was beautifully hilarious.

Mrs. Alexander lightly blew her whistle again, which Evan thought certainly wasn’t necessary then, and stood silently before saying: “Learn to play right, Evan.”

She then left them.

Evan wasn’t liking the warmth in his face so he left too. He also didn’t feel like looking at Jonas and Lee anymore because of their dumb haircuts. And other reasons too.

He stuffed his hands in his coat pockets and turned his head down as he stomped through the sand. He began to mumble sounds of frustration, but they were something soft. Of the dual halves of frustration--  anger and helplessness-- he was much of the latter. He kept going through the grass with his head like that, forcing himself not to look at his favorite window of the adjacent classroom (it was his favorite because someone for some reason had drawn a mushroom in the negative space of the dust there and it had never been wiped away). He kept going, just like that. His boots felt heavy and stupid. Stupid! Suddenly, he remembered to take the sand out. He sat on the curb briefly and poured out the heaviness, which felt good. Both shoes he did, and his face felt a little cooler too.

 After the final bell sounded in the classroom and most kids had settled into their plastic blue desk chairs, Mrs. Alexander tapped the whiteboard with her marker because she wanted to start the lesson.

Mrs. Alexander was a strange woman, as her third-graders had decided long ago. She had big fish lips and a throaty voice and an inclination to always want to start the lesson before anybody was really ready. Her conventional impatience would seem to predict a fastidiousness in dress and manner, but there was an absolute tendency toward disorder in whatever it was she did. She often wore strange-colored pants (like fuchsia or even brown, which can be weird in pants) and tight tank-tops which clung to her folding figure. She let herself be taken by mid-lecture tangents, like the topic of mold during a discussion of adverbs, and she sometimes looked undoubtedly at a particular kid while doing so. 

There were school-wide sleepover rumors that she’d been struck by lightning as many as four times! which would attempt to explain her behavior. But, of course, nobody really believed this, and not just because they were obvious rumors. Rather, it was because of another surprising and unspoken quality looming about her. In all her randomization, there existed somewhere, on a larger scale, the most careful organization. There was a subtle instinctiveness to what she said and did-- it wasn’t appealing, but it was natural. She wore her red pants on only the fiery days and her black pants on the somber ones. Although momentarily her tangents seem to come at the wrong times, the next day they would marinate and somehow seem timely. Students found themselves remembering what she’d said with an unintentional clarity (especially if she had been looking at them) which caused them wonder if there was perhaps a purpose to it after all. It was only through Mrs. Alexander that entropy could work so deliberately.  

She filled every day’s entire cell in her planner with one or two large-fonted words. On this day, it was ANIMALS. She’d glanced at it in the morning before the kids came in and nodded as if to say, “Ah, yes,” and an entire day’s lesson materialized in her head. 

“Kids,” she said, marker still drumming the blank board. Tap tap tap.

The room faded to silence, except for a whisper out of Jonas who tapped Marcus’s shoulder and said: “Hi, pass it down.”

Marcus was lurched forward onto the back of Abigail’s chair, ready to pass it down, before Mrs. Alexander said:

“Kids,” and finally there was decided silence.

She uncapped her pen and wrote ECOSYSTEM, then circled it.

“An ecosystem is an enclosed society. An ecosystem’s ability to last depends on a group of animals’ ability to stay connected.”

She kept her body angled toward the class but a hand on the board while she sketched a cartoon food web with arrow successions of a beetle, a frog, a snake, and a rabbit. Mrs. Alexander wasn’t a fantastic artist but there was a nobility to her carelessness with the figures that her class understood. It was as if the figures should have naturally existed already in the audience’s mind, and so to draw them at all was a feat itself.

“A predator, class, is an animal who eats another animal. A prey is he who is eaten.”

She nodded at them slowly, panning her eyes inquisitively across the room. Lee was scratching at a piece of gum on the underside of his desk with one hand’s pointer finger and picking his nose with the other. Evan was counting the sunflowers on Mattie’s dress beside him, hoping to finish before the end of the lesson.  One, two, three, four...

“Can anyone guess who the predator is?”

Mattie lifted her chin from her desk and flung one hand up in the air.

“It’s the rabbit,” she said. Then, to Lee who was slouched in the seat beside her: “I know that because rabbits eat snakes.”

...Nine, ten, eleven, twelve…

“Wrong,” Mrs. Alexander said. “Anyone else?”

“The snake,” Marcus said.

“Also wrong. How about the prey?”

“The prey is the beetle,” Mattie said with a louder voice and higher chin, as if to amend the outcome.

…twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two. Thirty-two sunflowers on Mattie’s dress, if he had counted correctly, which he probably hadn’t. It was then that Evan was struck with how well he’d gotten to know the colors and shapes. He really liked her in that dress. She looked almost primal in it and now he couldn’t stop thinking about how she just belonged in it. Evan really liked when things were where they belonged.

“Wrong, wrong, wrong,” Mrs. Alexander was saying.

Evan leaned over to Mattie suddenly.

“You look so nice, Mattie,” he whispered.

She jerked her head around so they were almost nose-to-nose.

“Could you let me feel your dress with my hand?” he said, because he was thinking it. He wasn’t scared to say it either.

She opened and closed her mouth, then scrunched up her nose before wildly raising a hand and announcing:

“Evan’s bothering my personal space.”

Mrs. Alexander didn’t pause her speaking, but motioned for Mattie to move seats, which she readily did, a little too noisily, Evan thought.

Mrs. Alexander clapped her hands together once. It gave everyone an unpleasant start.

“Kids!” she said. “All these animals you’ve shouted do eat but they also get eaten. I’m not circling anyone here because they’re all predators, and they’re all prey.”

Everyone suddenly had questions, which made Mrs. Alexander’s eyes bright.

 “Why?” Marcus wanted to know.

“Good question, Marcus,” Mrs. Alexander said. “The way the animals stay connected in this system here is through being both predators and prey. See here? The frog eats the beetle, but it also gets eaten by the snake. So the frog is the connector between the beetle and the snake.”

“Oh,” Marcus said.

“Why do all animals have to be predators?”

“To survive,” Mrs. Alexander said.

“But why do all animals have to be predators to survive?” Annie protested, except for she said it like predachurs. “Why couldn’t they just run away to survive?”

Mrs. Alexander’s voice became soft. She stood with her back folds pressed against the board fully now and drummed her marker slowly, with rhythmic precision.

“If an animal runs away, it won’t die from the jaws of another predator but it will die from the failure of itself. It will get hungry, because all animals get hungry. And it will starve. It is an inescapable fact that every animal will be eaten anyway. A better survival tactic than running away is to focus on finding food for itself.”

“But what if--”

“I’m not finished, Annie. And not only would you die if you weren’t both a predator and a prey, but the system itself would too.”

The classroom held a stillness then; the wind-chimes in the playground garden could almost be heard near the back of the room. Mrs. Alexander turned her back to the class again and began to erase the diagram, not triumphant, but complete.

As the inked figures disappeared from beneath the rag under Mrs. Alexander’s grip, a small voice entreated her to face the class again.

“Mrs. Alexander,” said Laura, a freckled girl known for her unyielding shyness which made itself known in Kindergarten roundup and persisted thereafter.

Everyone gawked dumbly at the sound of her voice except for Mrs. Alexander who faced her plainly. 

“I have a bunny at home and her name is Grace and I don’t want her to be a predator. She’s innocent and it’s sad. Are animals innocent?”

The class watched Mrs. Alexander’s strange figure shift curiously as she crossed her arms and thought. She looked to the ceiling and the class followed her gaze. Her eyes leveled again, and the class came down too.

“It’s natural,” she said. “They’re innocent, and they’re not.”

Evan’s walk home from school was a colorfield of green and yellow-- the afternoon sun made the live and dead grass complement each other so nicely on the hills. So much about the world was still and simple. He would go home, have dinner (probably chicken and string beans or lasagna if he was lucky), brush his teeth, and go to bed. It was all perfectly unchanging. Yet what irritated him was this profound blueness growing within him. Blueness to the point of exhaustion. Like a heavy tapeworm unfolding in his belly, and he didn’t understand why. Of course, he knew he had a perfectly satisfactory explanation handy, but this blueness was too big to be put to rest by only that. Of course, he had gotten in such trouble today, but he didn’t think much of that. People would forget about that eventually. He only kept thinking of what Mrs. Alexander said about the animals and their innocence. And they’re not. Why did she have to say: “And they’re not.” It was such blueness.

The following day, Mrs. Alexander was dressed in dark-blue velvet pants and a tight black turtleneck. She blew her whistle at no one in particular mid-recess, which was unprecedented, and caused the class to come ambling towards her through the sand. They circled around her in gentle watchfulness as she crouched an inch or two to hold the shoulders of a yellow-haired boy with a lollypop stick hanging out of his mouth.

 “Jeremy is our new student,” she said, and nodded around the circle. “He’d like to join you as you play.”

Mrs. Alexander then removed herself from the circle and relocated on the other side of the playground. She could only be identified if you looked extra carefully through the poles of the play structure, which no one did. She was claim to shapelessness again.

 There was a low wind as the class stood around him and watched with wonder and freshness. Lee picked his nose curiously beside Evan.

Jeremy removed the lollypop from his mouth.

“M-my name i-is J-jeremy. I-m fr-fr-from S-S-South Dakota a-and I--,” he started.

Between the strained syllables and broken sounds, a light arousal took Lee’s brow, and he glanced about to search for Jonas, who he then saw was unreachable on the south side of the circle. He removed his finger from his nostril and tapped Evan on the shoulder.

“Hey, you wanna know what would be funny?”

Evan blinked.

“Go up and ask Jeremy what word starts with an F and ends with a U-C-K,” Lee said.

Evan smiled in a way that looked like a frown.

“Hey Jeremy.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reviews

[emipoemi]

The title drew me in, for I had a feeling that I knew where the story was going to be about, however, I must say, the read wasn't entirely up to the standards for someone claiming to be a creative writing major. You prove to have a very extensive vocabulary, which a writer should prize to have, but a good portion of the story was written as though by a third grader (and it's not even in first person). So that was kind of awkward. If you make it first person, then it would actually make sense - only you should then edit the rest of the narrative accordingly. Second of all, with a title as "Firetruck", the animal segment seemed completely out of place. It was an absolutely brilliant piece of writing (in fact the best consecutive piece of writing in the entire story), but it had no purpose in the story. It felt like an entirely different story altogether. I might therefore suggest you write a series of stories with these characters (à la Junie B. Jones). It might be fun for you. For the characters are great (it's not particularly clear, especially at their introduction, whether Jonas and Lee are actually Evan's friends....you a bit later paint them as the class bullies, but that's after a decent bit where we as the reader think that Evan is overhearing their conversation), but stories, especially short ones, should contain ONE underlying plot and message. The one for this is "Firetruck", so maybe they learn about vehicles/modes of transportation, and save the animals for another story? For the ending too: why does Evan agree to Lee's challenge when he hasn't yet figured out why the joke is funny AND he knows it would get people in trouble? Does he want to be part of their clique? Yes, you mention that he's ugly and weird and so obviously inclusion and acceptance is a challenge for him, but it's not quite established his actual place among the group or his reasons for doing it all.

Don't get me wrong, this is a great story overall, but you should decide on whether to make it first person and a third grader voice, or third person in your own educated voice (rather than the two at once), and also stick to one story line to reach one means and end. One thing more: Mrs. Alexander's character description is freaking awesome! Love it. I would simply put the description of her voice a bit before when she's scolding Evan for having sworn; and Annie's lisp is a good feature. Love that. I just think a third grader of her description wouldn't know the grammatical intricacies between "couldn't" and "can't" (I hear her more saying "why CAN'T they just run away to survive?").

That is all I have to say. Forgive my bluntness, if it was too much for you. But this is a great story overall, and you could (and I recommend should) turn this into a series) Well done!