by Lorraine Ray
When school ends that day she's glad. She hurries away her fastest, past the creosote bush and the snake hole, along the hardened mud rut, to where her mother waits. Holding out the note, she runs forward. Her mother takes it and reads it to herself.
Oh, there's been a lot of tragedy at her school, her mother explains. Does she remember when Miss Flynn cut her hand on the broken aspirin jar? That was her big nervous breakdown. She lives above her father's funeral parlor and isn't that a strange place for a lady to sleep?
And what of Mr. Harris? Well, Mr. Harris disappointed someone. He was from Indiana or his father was or his mother was or he lived there once-her mother, a big Indiana booster, isn't certain. But the big kids will tell her what happened and there's no use trying to hide anything. He harmed himself. He put a bad finish to the end of his life. But they're Congregationalists and should feel nothing but pity about it. She should remember that.
At night her brother sits on the couch beside her. They watch a Jerry Lewis movie on TV and during a commercial he tells her what the older kids know. Mr. Harris hung himself. Whether you get hung or hang yourself it's all the same: your tongue swells up, turns purple, and sticks out between your teeth. When you go into your grave, you become a skeleton, but it takes a lot of time.
That night in her bed she tussles with her sheets. When she goes into her grave, she'll become a skeleton. In the dark room the hunched coats in her closet become Mr. Harris teaching Mr. Rykken to say his r's. She hears Mr. Rykken muttering the rhyme about the rugged rustlers; she can't hear what Mr. Harris says. Only her controlled and repetitious thoughts about rabbits living in a shoebox produce sleep.
