Fiction by Hallie Johnston
Hallie Johnston is a writer from the South. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Miami. Her work has appeared in the Southern Humanities Review, Saw Palm, The Boiler, The Louisville Review, and The Citron Review, among others.
Kindergarten
Their class is a windowless room in the basement of the Methodist church, and though Bird usually looks to nature for her drawings—tulips, dogwoods, Alabama pines—she knows her idea instantly when the teacher assigns a portrait of God. She begins with a purple crayon and a great oval. The other ladybugs stare into space.
Each kid sits at a tiny table with a laminated insect at the center, categorizing the class by bug. Bumblebees are the boys who come back from bathroom break too fast to have washed their hands, who flip their eyelids inside out to terrify. Caterpillars are the good, quiet girls, and the butterflies chase boys at recess. Grasshoppers are the strong boys hungry for everything—food, football, attention.
Bird sits at the ladybug table with the other kids who sometimes get in trouble. The teacher orbits them now in a perfume cloud of Estée Lauder. Her cable-knit sweater has elephant-shaped pockets and “Roll Tide” stitched on the back—dark red letters that remind Bird of a stomachache or disappointment, but she doesn’t say this. Adults don’t like criticism. She’s learned this from her parents’ arguments in the kitchen after dinner.
“I beg your pardon,” the teacher says and picks up Bird’s drawing. Face in paper and back of her hand to Bird, she has a ruby class ring on the finger that used to wear a gold band. “Why did we not follow directions?”
“It’s a balloon,” Bird says. “See.” She traces the shape with her finger. “I dreamed it.”
The teacher sighs. Her breath is mothballs. “What possessed you?”
Possessed. What a word, Bird thinks. Reminds her of snakes and scales like mermaids. She takes her paper, presents it to the teacher from a different angle.
The teacher points to the door.
Having been hall-banished earlier that week for using too much glue, Bird goes without a word, sits in her spot near the applesauce stain.
“Stand up, Evelyn,” the teacher says coming into the hall. Evelyn is Bird’s birth certificate name, her serious in-trouble name. “Listen here,” the teacher says. “God is a man. A good man.”
Because Bird hears a different sound in her teacher’s voice when she says “man” for the last time, like a hiss or steam, she looks to see if she’s okay and finds that her teacher is all silver. Her face. Her hands. Her legs.
Bird isn’t alarmed. She’s seen this before, her own mother turning a similar color last Saturday. Bird was hiding to hide, to see if anyone would look for her—they didn’t—when, beneath her parents’ bed, she made three discoveries. Her dad’s 1970s college diploma. A grocery bag of malted eggs and jelly beans for Easter. A jewelry box, a St. Christopher necklace inside. She and her older sister were both given one as babies to wear at their christening. Bird held the gold in her hand and wondered. Was there someone else? A replacement child? Someone her mom could love more and want to play hair and restaurant with?
These are the questions she asked as her mom went silver. Bird stared at her in all her monochrome. She tried to speak, to tell her she was metallic, but didn’t have the words. Instead, she said, “Never mind,” and took a step forward and hugged her.
Bird does the same now with her teacher. Though her hands don’t meet, she reaches and squeezes. When she lets go, the teacher dabs her eyes with the heel of her hand. She tells Bird she can re-do the assignment at circle time, but make sure she uses her brain.
Alone at the ladybug table, Bird selects three crayons: brown, blue, yellow.
The class sits on carpet squares on the floor. When Bird looks for the teacher, to show her new God—hair, robe, halo—she can’t find her. She searches the circle of faces one by one, and then she sees her, sitting small with legs tucked and crisscrossed, same as the other girls and boys.