This story was written for the Spring 2022 24 Hour Short Story Contest run by WritersWeekly.com. It is a quarterly contest. If you are interested in knowing what the prompt and some of the rules were governing this particular contest, scroll to the bottom of the post where I shared the prompt on my NV Rivera Youtube channel.
This is a 3 minute read.
EDUCATORS UNEARTHED
I continue to be in awe over how little most adults know about the livelihoods of teachers. It’s one thing for a classroom of minors to imagine their teacher has no need of a restroom, or that her bedroom’s in the teacher’s lounge, but the frequency with which I can slip through velvet ropes at the mere mention of educational intentions is staggering. I’ve given up on feeling guilty about it, or putting much effort into my explanations. I have needs, this is how I fulfill them. The greatest of my needs is to halt the arrival of Spring and all that comes with it. It’s a nightmare of a season for teachers and no one’s talking about it.
This year I used this lackluster teacher-superpower to gain access to the zoo on Groundhog Day. It’s an event reserved for politicians and local press, only pumped into schools through livestreams and supplemental pdfs. I proposed that, with a firsthand account, I’d create a master lesson plan to share district-wide that would not only reignite in-school excitement over Groundhog Day, but would also increase school trips to the zoo by at least 20%. The truth was I wanted to witness the overgrown rodent’s prediction to see if there was something that could help me break the cycle.
I’ve been teaching for thirteen years. They say most teachers don’t make it past three. I often wonder how those heroes dug themselves out. In year one, I’ll be honest, I didn’t know I was trapped. It was the second Spring, when the idealism was waning and the year was coming to a close, that I first became aware. Marjorie Hamm was in the teacher’s lounge, staring into the courtyard. It was her last year, after thirty years of teaching, so I suspected that accounted for her watery eyes, but she said, “What’ll happen when I till the soil this Spring?”
“Will a gardening guru be born in retirement, Marge?” I asked.
She turned toward me wild-eyed. I stepped back, but she crossed the room, grabbing each of my arms just above the elbow with her gnarled, chalk-covered fingers. “Don’t you till your soil in the Spring, Janet? Isn’t that the first thing you do when school’s out?”
I pulled myself free, rubbing my arms. “Marjorie! What are you talking about?”
She leaned back on the long table in the middle of the room where we wrote lesson plans, graded papers, ate breakfast and lunch, cried on bad days and laughed on good days. That wasn’t the first time the table served as support for someone lost under the weight of a moment too much for one’s soul to carry, and it wasn’t the last.
Marjorie didn’t meet my eyes when she whispered, “Someone told me to till the soil. I don’t know who. I don’t even remember the conversation. But I went to my garden, got on my knees and worked the soil with my bare hands.”
I stared at her hands and imagined the chalk dust as black, loamy soil. I saw clumps clinging to her palms and then I looked at my hands. I was lost somewhere between a daydream, a memory, and a craving, picturing that same soil on them. “Marge,” I said, “I think I did till the soil. And I think I will till the soil today, after school.”
Marjorie and I locked eyes. She blinked tears down her wrinkled cheeks. “I’m so sorry, Janet. I’m sorry there was no way to tell you before. It seems we can’t talk about it…” She shook her head, gave me an awkward hug and left the room, the school, and my life, forever.
That afternoon I went home, mindlessly packed my school supplies into my hall closet where they’d stay until the Fall, and walked out to the yard. I kneeled in the just-warming soil of my garden. Part of me resisted the act, but it was no part of me that had any power to stop it.
I dug my hands in deep, feeling the lingering chill buried beneath the surface as the sun beat on my back. I let the cool clumps of soil drizzle from my outstretched fingers as I pulled them out in front of me. Then I plunged my hands even deeper wrapping my right hand around the familiar loamy texture of soil and my left hand wrapping around something… else. I tore my right hand free and plunged it down next to my left hand to get two hands around this foreign solid substance that had no business being in my garden. As I pulled it back, I wasn’t leaning backward to free it from the ground, instead I leaned forward, closer to the ground. I smelled the soil, the rot and the dampness lingering from the last rain as my nose touched the ground before slowly getting pulled in, and through, the garden. My head, shoulders, back, buttocks, legs and feet followed as I was reverse-birthed into the soil for my season of sleep. You see, what no one told me, what Marjorie couldn’t talk about, what I’ve been unable to escape for thirteen years, is the fact that some of those weird misunderstandings about teachers and their livelihoods are true: completely beyond our own control, when the Spring semester ends, and before Summer vacation can begin, teachers are thrust into hibernation.
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What is the weirdest rumor you ever heard (or spread) about one of your teachers? (In my first year of teaching I was out sick due to pneumonia for two weeks at the end of October and the beginning of November. One of the senior teachers who I shared a classroom with spread the rumor that I had won the lottery and left teaching. Needless to say, I was very confused when I returned, still not feeling 100% and was being congratulated by students and staff alike!)
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The inspiration
Here is the video of the prompt so you can write your own story.