"Ish" by Sarah Navin

ish

Sarah Navin The school’s teeming this year, too many students, everyone shouldered together in rooms that can’t get cold anymore—all this body heat. Fire marshal be damned, we hold independent study hall in one of the portables in the back lot. Gravel and chain link.

Trailers on the tarmac, just skiffs untethered from the mothership.

These are the badlands. No gods out here, no principals.

Independent study hall, but nobody studies. I’ve got the eighth graders. I’m too young for anyone to take seriously, not the kids, not the other teachers who stop me in the empty hall and say where should you be, miss?

I’m the new teacher, I tell them. I’m where I’m supposed to be.

And maybe that’s not exactly right but screw it, I think, screw it, it’s not the drugstore. One more week there and I would’ve lit the place on fire with people inside. I used to think about that a lot: the smoking gauze unspooling, the inhalers blowing like pipe bombs. I don’t think about it as much anymore. I think about independent study hall.

That’s not what the kids call it. They call it Ish, hard-pressed to tell you what the acronym stands for anymore. Harder pressed to tell you what an acronym even is. It sounds like they’re saying itch, or adding a suffix to mean not really, not exactly. Okay-ish.

Late-ish. Old-ish.

I can’t teach a real class yet. If I could, I’d be giving a lesson on Homer instead of telling one of three Zachs to take his finger out

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of his girlfriend’s mouth. Two girls are passing a vape pen back and forth under their desks, and I have to stop them too. They don’t pull this shit in their normal classes, just here, in this limbo we’ve been exiled to. It’s terra nullius is what it is, it’s maritime law, and I’m the child-captain at the helm taking us positively nowhere.

I do try to slip in a learning moment every now and then. I ask the room, do you guys know what an acronym is?

No, but I’ll look it up for you, says one of the girls, unpocketing her phone.

It’s a strange trek that the kids have to make to the back lot, weaving between the humming machinery and the custodial shed, through a forestry of flagpoles, past the ashen stripe of land that was once a very promising garden, or so I’m told.

There’s no wind to move the flags, so they just hang at halfmast like sails we’re not sure we want to fly—even the school flag, marked only with the silhouette of our woolly mammoth mascot.

I hear they used to send a kid out every morning to raise them, but it’s not worth the trouble anymore; every few hours there’s something new to mourn. So screw it, we keep them flying low, our sympathies spread so thin you can see straight through them.

The students have decided that they would rather be animals.

They show up wearing cat-ear headbands, tails clipped to their belt loops. Fingerless gloves that really do give the impression of opossum hands when they pluck another spicy chip out of another bottomless mylar bag. Some of these kids are old enough to have their learner’s permits, but we catch them slicking stray hairs back with their licked-wet knuckles. They’ve started growling at their rivals.

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The faculty holds a couple of meetings just to talk about the animal thing. We can ban the accessories, that’s what we can do, says science teacher.

Murmurs of agreement: no hairbands or hats. No tails. Can we stop them from adding whiskers and fawn spots to their faces in eyeliner, drawing snarling muzzles on the medical masks that we’re just thankful they sometimes remember to wear?

These poor bastards, these veterans, slouched around a tray of gummy oatmeal cookies in the conference room. Storeboughts.

For them, this is just the latest in a history of plagues: strep, lice, the collectible bracelets. Those sneakers with wheels in the soles.

And now, not even halfway to the benchmark tests, the kids have gone feral.

(Meanwhile I’m sitting pretty in my rolling chair, sailing smooth, because—say it with me: it’s not the goddamn drugstore.)

We’re considering compromises now. Maybe we tell the students they can paint gills on their throats or whatever, but only on Fridays. Add it to the dress code. What about species restrictions? Surely there’s a distinction to be made between the collies and the coyotes.

Shit, I don’t mean to laugh. But it bubbles up and out like a hiccup and everyone’s twisting to look at me, concern darkening their eyes, like they’ve known I was here all along but they’re only just now noticing me. The way you might look at a chair that you hadn’t given much thought to until a poltergeist moved it across the room.

Something funny? someone says, but I don’t know who, because I didn’t see whose mouth moved.

Ventriloquists, these guys.

Sorry, I tell the cookie tray, I just. I just.

Just what?

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I just don’t know how I’m going to keep a straight face when I tell the students that they’re not allowed to be wolves.

History teacher gets real grim and says, you better figure it out then. What subject do you teach, again? science teacher asks.

Ish. Excuse me?

Independent study hall, I say. I’m the new teacher.

Here comes the great rolling of eyes, slumping of tired spines against chair backs.

Look, history teacher says, don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re not teaching. You’re zookeeping.

I don’t say anything but I am, in fact, with the wrist-flick turn of some internal ignition, taking it the wrong way. The smell of menthol and latex leaks into the room. A ghost. I bite a nice little chunk out of my inner cheek and cradle it on my tongue till the meeting’s through.

Another shooting today, this one just a state away. Shaky footage on the news of riots somewhere else, unrelated.

In the front office I catch assistant principal by the elbow and say, are we going to have a moment of silence? Because, out there in the portables, you know, there’s no intercom, so we won’t know if you call for one. I’m just saying.

She’s a weathered woman, elegant still, with eyes so pale I think it must hurt when the light hits them. When I try to picture my older self, this is who I imagine. Then I wonder who exactly I think I’m kidding, and I return to my standby fantasy of being hit by a car just hard enough to set me up for life. Assistant principal makes her mouth into a smile and touches my arm.

If we held a moment of silence every time it felt necessary, she says, we’d never get anything done. But I hear you. Don’t think I don’t hear you.

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Then she hooks her handbag over her shoulder and leaves the room. Fuck, who says we’re getting anything done?

Bad move, outlawing the ears and tails and antlers. The kids come limping into Ish on Monday like they’ve been wounded.

Hunted. Morale is down and tensions are high, and before the period is over I have to break up two fights, tooth and claw.

They’re covering the Yellowstone wolf reintroduction in science. Apparently when the teacher pulled up a clip of gray wolves loping out of their temporary pen and into the wild, half the students started howling. They kept going, voices strident in the tiled lab, even after science teacher shut the projector down and flipped the fluorescents back on.

This is it, the year is screwed. I’m screwed. By winter the admins will be cutting dead weight and I’ll be the first to go, a burning sacrifice for the angry parents. A pyre for them to warm their hands around.

I’m trying though, still trying. On Tuesday I ask the kids to tell me something they learned over the weekend.

We’re in the middle of a major extinction event, says one of the Camerons.

Well shit, I say. (Fuck. I’m not supposed to curse in front of them.) What’s going extinct? Um, they say, I’m not sure. I think, like, everything?

I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to hold down a job. In interviews I’m bright and eager, seduced by the version of myself I swear I could be if someone would finally just put me to the right task in the right place. But by the time I’m on the payroll it’s too late for all involved; they’ve hired the chrysalis hoping for

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a butterfly, and the moth that clocks in is disappointing as dirt.

I’m just waiting for the day that I land where I’m supposed to be.

Maybe I don’t have the temperament for this job. Or for any job besides, I don’t know, digging deep holes in the ground and then acting surprised when I find myself standing at the bottom of one.

I’d be good at that. I am good at that.

But I’m not going to give up on this one yet, not when it might be the most hilariously noble thing I’ve ever pretended to know how to do. It’ll have to give up on me first. Get real sick of me, chase me out the back door with a broom and an aerosol can.

Today we have an active shooter drill. The lights are off. The students have to sit under the tables while the safety officer marches from door to door, rattling the handles. Shaky on the protocol and at a loss for anything more useful to do, I’m under a table too.

The air smells like the cluster of bodies on either side of me: skin and sweat and bargain perfume. I examine the fossilized chewing-gum thumbprints on the underside of the table. The drill before this, we had to barricade the door and arm ourselves with something heavy or sharp. Turns out heavy and sharp things are hard to come by, thanks to our students’ talent for improvisational self-mutilation. I figure the next drill will have us tunneling through the floor. Maybe I could configure some sort of smoke bomb with all the confiscated vapes. Worst case scenario, the safety officer told us, play dead.

I want to look around to see how my students are doing, maybe say something poignant, but I’m in great danger of doing that thing where I laugh when absolutely nothing’s funny. So we all just hug our knees and listen to each other breathe. *

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Halfway through Ish, I’m playing cat’s cradle with my lanyard when something happens. It’s so subtle I nearly miss it, but the change in energy just about makes my ears pop.

A boy sits down at an empty desk next to one of the Katelins and she yelps. You sat on my tail, she whines. It’s there on the seat.

Principal said no tails, I tell her. Wait, what tail do you mean?

She perks up like she’s been dutifully lugging this answer around, the weight lifted only now by me asking the right question.

My opossum tail, she says. It’s on another plane so you can’t see it, but I can feel it. It’s part of my astral form. Have you ever, like, left your body before?

At this cue, this first plaintive cry into the dark, the students start to grow their phantom limbs. They complain of aching fangs.

Broad wings, painfully cramped in the narrow portable. This structure can’t contain all of them. Horns and antennae tangle together, graze the low ceiling. You’d swear you could almost see it—their fins and fur and tusks.

In the weeks that follow, I watch them negotiate and refine this new science. How keenly can they feel their astral parts, and when?

How should injuries be treated? They hold hypnosis sessions in pairs of two, coaxing the animals out of themselves through mumbled recollections of barnyard births and pack hunts.

I never answer opossum-Katelin, because this feels like one of those subjects I’m not supposed to address with the kids. Like gender or tattoos. But sure, I’m thinking, I’ve left my body lots of times. Behind the register. Under the flickering overheads. In the parking lot after dark, pharmacy sign still glowing a sore red, me trying to remember something, anything about myself besides this grudging feeling I have that I am someday going to explode.

Of course I’ve left my body. Where I’ve gone to it’s hard to say, but if I came back with tall, bleeding antlers, or another set of teeth,

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neither of which anyone could see with their eyes, it wouldn’t be the worst thing I’ve brought with me.

The principal calls me into his office. Nowhere to sit but the corduroy armchair of unspeakable shame, a haunted artifact saturated with two decades’ worth of student tears. Suspensions, expulsions, innumerable slaps on the wrist. Fuck this guy. We could have met in the conference room.

So, he says. I know we had you on track to maybe take over an English class next year.

Yes, I say.

I trust, he says, that you have a backup plan?

This is my backup plan, I tell him. I’ve backed up as far as I can go.

I’m sure that’s not true. You’re young, he says.

I was going to teach Homer.

He laces his fingers together. I didn’t know principals really did that.

Pearls before swine, he says. You’d be better off giving that lesson at one of the charter schools. Have you checked out Saint Antony’s?

No, I haven’t checked out Saint Antony’s.

When I leave his office, I turn the corner and lean back until my shoulder blades are flush with the wall. Close my eyes, knock my head against the brick once. Twice. I imagine something heavy, something sharp. Somewhere, down another hall, someone mewls like a hungry stray.

Math teacher pokes his head out of a classroom. He’s been kind of skittish, kind of quiet the few times I’ve seen him. Maybe there’s something kindred here. I smile at him.

Uh, young lady, he says, where should you be right now?

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* Into the back lot I go, through the weeds, up the three squeaking steps to my portable, and stop for a moment. Let the sweat bead on the nape of my neck. I didn’t even make it to winter. I lasted longer than this at the drugstore, but I can’t think about that now.

If I do, I’ll swallow all this heat and burst, finally, into flame.

I can’t stay out here for the whole period, either. I’m already late. The kids have probably formed a new economy just since I’ve been gone, all vape cartridges and spicy chips. I have to go in.

When I open the door, half a dozen rabbits come bounding past my feet in a flurry of movement. I go wheeling back off the stairs. They spread out across the lot, noses twitching, white bunny-fur blinding against the asphalt. They’re followed by singlefile streams of squirrels and chipmunks that wind around my ankles.

There’s a grand, papery percussion of beating wings before all the birds spill from the portable, pigeons and crows and parakeets guiding each other into the daylight. Two snakes next. Unbothered mice. There are cats, too, so many cats, arcing drowsily against the doorframe as they pad out of the portable. The dogs follow. After them are the foxes and raccoons, squinting against the sun and humming low complaints in their throats.

Deer. Horses. Wolves. A black bear, snuffling and grunting its way down the steps and around the side of the portable. Some of them seem to nod to me, to linger until they catch my eye. Others dart and are gone, into the woods that flank the school.

So many of them I want to hold, stupidly—a child’s urge. But I don’t reach out to touch them, only stand at attendance and watch them pass. When it seems that the last of them have gone, I step up and into the portable. My eyes have to adjust to the dim, but

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an earthy, roadkill smell in the humid room tells me that I’m still not alone.

Between discarded cell phones and homework packets on the floor, the littered aftermath of their mutation, lies an opossum on its side. I stop in place. After a moment of slack-jawed shallow breathing, it blinks and rights itself. It pauses to reposition its tongue in its crowded mouth. Then it trots past me, still stinking of death, and pauses on the bottom stair. The opossum glances to its left, then to its right, with the absurd nonchalance of a creature with nowhere in particular to be, and then waddles in the general direction of a chattering squirrel.

I crumple into my chair and stay there a long while, staring down the barrel of the empty portable.

Shit. I’ll have to start sending my resume out.

I lock up the portable when I’m ready to leave, and I head toward the car lot. I check for pigeons on the powerlines or tabbies in the low bushes, but they’ve all gone. A crow perched on a flagpole, maybe? Nope. I can’t blame them.

I pause, chin tilted skyward, and consider the rumple of blue linen hanging from the center pole.

It takes me a minute to figure out the pulleys, but I manage to raise the school flag to full staff. It flies high enough to be visible over the school’s roof, over some of the trees. It even catches a breeze and unfurls in the balmy air. The woolly mammoth’s likeness works itself out from the folds.

Maybe the kids are gone for good in their new forms, I don’t know. Scattered across the continent.

Creating new colonies. Or somehow ascended to this astral plane I’ve been hearing about, this place beyond places. But if

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they ever decide to come back, for any reason, at least they’ll have this beacon to point their packs and flocks towards. I’ll rest a little easier knowing that much.

Me, though, I’d better find my car and get off school grounds before somebody comes out and escorts me. I don’t work here anymore.