A Phantom Herd

by Lorraine Ray

The next day is Halloween. I ought to be happy because it's my favorite holiday, but instead I feel the consequences of Mr. Harris' death.

  In class I circle pumpkins and sing a song about ghosts sitting on a fence. Miss Flynn in a frenzy wants to see us happy and when, after lunch, she announces, "We're going to do something fun this afternoon," all the children clap.

  Miss Flynn opens a low cabinet, which none of us have noticed before, and tells a boy to reach in and shunt out a box. The box is long, battered, and dusty.

  The class gathers around, giggling, the boys jostling shoulders, the girls hauling up their anklets. I stand with them and try to be excited too, when Miss Flynn flings open the lid.

  We look down at a big paper skeleton.

  "We'll hold up Mr. Bones," says Miss Flynn, walking to the corner of the room and taking down the pole she uses to open the high windows, "and fly him past the classrooms. We'll create a little mischief! Shall we? Won't that be fun?"

  "Yes, yes!" we cry.

  With some twine she has in her desk Miss Flynn ties the skeleton to the pole. When it's attached, she lifts the pole and with a bob makes the skeleton bow.

  Out of the classroom we trot, shivering in the sudden heat, the sun's intense yellow light. The skeleton swoops against the turquoise sky; it's the frightening standard under which we sally, following Miss Flynn around the side of the building to the north walls. There we sneak, smelling the damp air dropping down upon us from the rooms above. "Shhh," whispers Miss Flynn, "we're ready."

  As the paper skeleton soars past the first room, laughter springs up and chairs topple and children dash to the windows. A boy with a pen in his hand climbs onto the window ledge and screams, "Get out of here, you skeleton man!"

  "Let's go on," says Miss Flynn.

  And together we steal forward to the second classroom and then to the third and then along a whole wing of the school.

  I glance up. The skeleton sails above me, its dangling arms reaching down toward me, its smile a vacant sneer. Rattling its way around the world. Where in this world is comfort?

  "You're crying," says Robert Ruiz.

  "She is," says a girl.

  "Why is she?"

  "You're really crying, aren't you?"

  "She is. She's crying. Look."

  "Are you afraid of the skeleton?" asks a boy who's only a blur. "Are you a little scaredy-girl?"