She forgets that Miss Engels still has her book, and Miss Engels is clutching it and nodding along to the German exchange student, Dolph, who is trying not to look at her breasts, so I figure Sadie will just get the book later. Then the bell rings, and none of us quite understand what has happened, but Sadie whispers to me and Arlo that her brother’s got some weed, and we should go to the field. Below eternity she writes bunnies = sex + death, and below that she writes = human (!).
She twists to look at us, scrunches her nose, hesitates. The name is in the clouds, and beneath it she writes eternity. Her writing is all swirls and loops and hard to read, but she’s written Mary Ruefle. She writes with chalk on the board, which is now underneath the luminous Van Gogh night because she hasn’t pulled down the projector screen. She shuts the book and jumps off the desk. She slides her glasses up her nose and holds the book close to her face, reads from it: We like to watch the rabbits screwing in the graveyard. With it, she returns to the front of the class and sits on her desk, swings her legs and clunks together the toes of her red boots.Ī- ha -here’s a poem, she says, that says the bunny gives us a lesson in eternity. She lifts Sadie’s textbook now, flips through the pages. She is pacing the aisles, picking up people’s things, considering them and returning them to their desks. What would be an absolute travesty, she says, is if you were to go through your entire life without meditating on these things. I look over at Arlo, who I’ve been kissing lately. We are dumbstruck and terrified of both of these things. She says, Not all of you have had sex, and none of you are dead, but probably all of you will have sex-and here she pauses with a sly grin, twists a curl of hair around her fingers-and I’m pretty sure all of you will die.
Miss Engels stands at the front of the class with a wobbly picture of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night on the whirring projector. The goths look like death without the sex. We’re all 16 and I think mostly preoccupied with only the first of the two, except for me and the goths who sit in the smokers’ pit even though only the Grundo twins and some non-goths smoke. We contemplate Shakespeare and Saint Augustine, and Miss Engels says all art is about sex and death. The week before Dad dies, we discuss aesthetics in Philosophy class. ‘Starry Night’ was shortlisted for the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
0 kommentar(er)
