TEXTBOOK

by SHELDON LEE COMPTON

Science class. Patricia pays attention. Pays attention like she’s got credit cards full of it. All the plastic attention they can handle.

The rest of the class pays attention to Patricia, the tight t-shirt even more tight over her melon belly. Chatter over her shoulder, food chain chatter at the front of the room where Mrs. Evans explains and explains. Chatter in Patricia’s head so that she can almost hear her thoughts in her throat, real words vibrating downward.

She raises her hand and Mrs. Evans calls on her without looking away from the caged boa propped on the edge of her desk.

“Can a baby inside of you hear what you’re thinking?”

Mrs. Evans says nothing and does not call down the kids laughing at the back of the room. Instead, she takes a white mouse from a box the class prepared the day before. Tiffany stabbed holes in the sides and top so the mice could live long enough to die.

Patricia raises her hand again but Mrs. Evans and the rest of the class watch the mouse and the snake. She writes another note in the margins of her textbook instead and resharpens her pencil.

In the textbook are pictures. Anatomy. The insides of men. Of women. The insides of her. She draws ash-light lines, curling around the skinless woman’s legs, wrapping them until they meet at the exposed stomach and then slickly enter her.

Blunt, Patricia sharpens.

Now the lead, knife-slender, continues its cut through the small and large intestine. Patricia works the pencil down to a nub again, circling a dark mass in the stomach. She hardly hears Mrs. Evans calling her name.

“Patricia. Am I boring you?” Mrs. Evans says. She is fumbling the chalk through spider web fingers, picking at it with her long, red nails.

“No, Mrs. Evans.”

The whispers. Patricia always has somebody to do. She’s never bored. Not Patricia. The giggles.

Patricia writes the names of three boys beside the skinless woman when there’s a snapfast thud from the boa’s cage. The mouse is a cotton ball in the unhinged mouth, a bloodied clump of twitch and panic.

Again, Patricia raises her hand. This time Mrs. Evans waves to the door, agitated, already sure a bathroom request is coming.

Patricia edges sideways out of her desk, closes her eyes and moves in a wobble across the classroom. She does not need the bathroom, only the silence. She rubs her stomach with snowflake fingertips and leans against the wall. When a student bangs open a locker just out of site she turns back to the door.

Walking into the classroom is crawling across broken glass, a gallows walk, the laughter a noose with teeth. Her textbook is in the floor, opened to her page. In red ink are the names of eight more boys scrawled beside the three she wrote. The circled mass in the stomach is now covered over in red. There is an X over each of the lidless eyes.

The crack of the book closing is the thud of a rattled cage and she thinks to herself, hopes it can hear her. That she can hear her. That he can hear her. 

(Originally published in Necessary Fiction).