The King of the Desert
Fiction by Mikaela Hart
Between the Lines by Indra O. (2022)
Now, the sky darkens early, just as it lightens late, and it does so suddenly. She doesn’t usually notice. She walks the aisles of her classroom, listening to the scratch of pencils on starchy paper. The students fidget this close to the end of the day. Their restlessness is a quick sigh, a ruffle of hair, the squeak of a shoe on the tile. She asks Marx to please stop writing in all capital letters, but he can’t. Something has happened to him that made him forget the lowercase half of the alphabet. Every day she asks him anyway, in the vague hope that the thing that went wrong is reversible.
She glances at his paper again. The assignment is a list of questions about a picture of a cow in a field. The cow used to be a dog but the students these days don’t remember that dogs could be friendly, so they had to change the picture to something more docile. The questions are things like, Where is the cow? And the answer could be, Under the cloud, or, Beside the flower, or even, On the ground. Marx has written, WHERE IS WHERE IS WHERE IS WHERE IS WHERE. He looks up at her for approval.
“Very good,” she says.
That is when she notices that the sky is dark. It isn’t black. It has a deep purple tint to it, the one that comes with that strange metallic smell, which means that tomorrow school will likely be cancelled and everyone will be required to stay inside.
The supplementary lights in the classroom come on. They get dimmer every day. She has spoken to Mr. Bram about it a few times before, and he promised to look into it.
When the clock strikes—a buzzing sound that always reminds her of a prison gate unlocking in a movie—she says, “You can pack up. Bring your papers up to the desk. And remember that no one goes out until everybody’s scarf is on properly.”
They line up to give her their work. Marx has filled nearly half the page with WHERE IS WHERE IS WHERE IS WHERE. She sees it for only a moment before June puts her paper on top.
In the dimness, the students dress. They each have a fleece tunic and a coat. Mittens and Velcro boots (few of them know how to tie their own laces), as well as a wool hat and a scarf that tightens around their mouths and noses. The scarf has some kind of air filter that the lab says will protect their lungs. No one says what from. It’s likely that no one even knows.
She dresses, too. Most of the teachers stay in the school for another few hours after the students leave, but she volunteers as a Walker for one of the southern neighbourhoods. She likes the exercise.
Her line has sixteen students ranging from age six to thirteen. Three of them are in her own class. Marx, June, and Fiona. The children line up in order of nearness to the school and she checks that all of their left mittens are secured to the pole line. Then they set off.
The air is bitterly cold, with that strange metallic scent on the breeze. She drops off Bailey and Michael first and watches them meander up the walkway to the door before their mother opens it and ushers them in. The mother waves. Some of the children on the pole line wave back.
When she looks back at the fourteen others, past Marx who walks with his face always upwards, past June at the very end, she sees him. He is standing behind June. He is not secured by his mitten to the pole line. He does not wear mittens at all. He follows only for the sake of following.
She turns away.
Sienna and her cousins live in a building that collapsed entirely on the right side during a storm three years ago. There is no mother waiting for them, but they go inside and Sienna peaks out the window with her scarf already down under her chin and she gives a thumbs-up sign to confirm that she’s locked the door. They go on.
The wind picks up as they near the edge of town. Eleven students become nine, which become four, and then she drops off Marx and finally she watches June go inside the narrow little shack that she shares with her sisters. She folds up the pole line, which is still warm in some places where the little fists gripped it. She puts it in her coat pocket. Then it is just her and him.
He comes alongside her when she begins the walk back to the school. She knows what he looks like. He is small for his age—nine—with big round eyes and hair of shifting browns, which falls thickly over his forehead and ears. His shoulders are narrow and bony, and she can often see the hollow of his collarbone. For some reason she always imagines a little bird perched there. Maybe because he likes birds. Maybe because she likes birds. Or maybe for some other ridiculous reason.
And there is ash in his hair.
This is a detail she is sure she imagined long ago, in a dream that lingered.
“It’s cold,” he says. His voice is so thin that the wind nearly drowns it out.
“It’s always cold.”
She knows his name, of course. It’s Jotham. An ancient name belonging to a king in a desert. She once asked her father if that’s why he picked it, to remember the desert, but he said that he didn’t know anything about a desert. He liked the way it sounded.
Jotham walks with her all the way back to the school. The wind tugs at his clothes, but he doesn’t notice. Why would he?
Only some of the lights in the squat little building are still on. When they near it he says, “Are you cold?”
“Yes.”
She presses the buzzer on the door and a moment later it opens. She goes down the hallway to the teachers’ room, where she sheds her coat and scarf and mittens and greets Emma, the teacher of the class above her own. Her body feels loose and heavy, like she might crumble. She rubs her wrists.
“Lots of work tonight?” asks Emma.
“Not much. You?”
“I gave them a test on sentence clauses. They bombed it. So, I have to plan another lesson for tomorrow.”
There is an unsaid question lingering in the air: why teach sentence clauses when most of these children will be dead before they reach adulthood? The answer, of course, is that many people hope they won’t be dead. Many people believe that teaching things like sentence clauses is what will save them.
“Sentence clauses,” Jotham echoes.
“Good luck,” she says to Emma.
“Thanks.”
She sits down at her desk and takes out the papers with the image of the cow and the questions. Jotham sits down cross-legged on the floor. He stays all evening.
***
The next day, school is closed. She hears the announcement on the radio in the early morning and is not surprised. She tightens the latches on her window, as everybody else will be doing.
The storm lasts all day.
***
The next afternoon when the children are on break, she takes Marx to the corner of the classroom where they do Resource, which is a word that implies that they have resources. Which they don’t.
Marx sits in a little blue chair, and she sits in a little red one.
“Did you have a good day yesterday?”
Marx nods.
“What did you do during the storm?”
“I read my book.”
His book is not real. It is a series of single words or phrases written on note paper in all capital letters.
“Was it interesting?”
He nods.
She writes a lowercase a on the top of her page. Marx copies it in his notebook. Then she covers her own notebook and asks him to write it from memory, and he does. She asks him what letter he just wrote, and he says that he doesn’t know. When she asks him to write it again, he’s forgotten the shape. She asks him to write the first letter of the alphabet and he writes A.
“Can I go to the gym?” he asks.
She says yes. He leaves his notebook on the little blue chair.
“He’s broken,” Jotham says.
“I know.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“I don’t know.”
She gets up and closes his notebook and brings it over to his desk. She says, “Who cares if he writes in capital letters? He can read and write fine. It doesn’t matter.”
“But he’s broken,” Jotham says.
“And you’re dead,” she says.
“Ouch.”
***
She goes to see Mr. Bram. This time she sits in the chair on the other side of his desk, and she feels like Marx, asked to do something impossible, watched.
“How are your students?” Mr. Bram asks.
“Good.”
“Who’s at the top of the class? If you know that, I mean. You don’t have to know off the top of your head.”
“It’s June.”
“Who?”
“The O’Sullivan girl. You remember her father. He went off.”
“Ah, yes. It always blows my mind that some people couldn’t get past the lab explosion, after so many years. Do you remember it? You must have been just a child. It looked like fireworks.”
“I remember it,” she says. “The ash killed my brother.”
“Oh. That’s right. I heard about that when we hired you. I’m sorry.”
“I came to talk about the lights.”
“What about them?”
“They’re dim. The students can’t see in the afternoon. They have to hold their noses an inch from their pages.”
Mr. Bram sits back. He presses his thumbs together and then separates them. His fingers leave white, numbed marks on each other. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“You said that last week.”
“And I kept my word. I called Janson. He said it didn’t seem urgent.”
Jotham says, “What a dick.”
“Thank you,” she says to Mr. Bram.
***
After she drops off the students, Jotham accompanies her back to the school. He reaches up and takes her hand in his. She can feel his fingers through her mitten. They are tiny and tight and cold.
“Why are you a Walker?” he asks.
“Because I like to walk.”
“Do you wish that you had walked me home?”
He doesn’t say, that day, because they both know what day he means.
***
It’s Friday. She has been watching the sky. It’s purple, and the wind is strong, and the students are complaining that the storm will land on a Saturday, and they won’t get a day off of school. She says that if they’d like she’ll give them homework that they can abandon. They agree.
Just after the darkness falls Emma knocks on her door. “We’re closing early.”
“Why?”
“Because the storm is early.”
June is sick, which means that Marx is the last on the line. On the way, the wind is wicked. She takes Sienna and her little cousins right up the door of their collapsed house for fear that they’ll be swept away on their journey up the walkway. The sky churns above them. Some of the smaller children start to cry.
“It’s alright,” she tells them.
Six-year-old Shauna is blown so hard by a sudden gust that she falls, and the pole line twists and everyone screams. She unclasps her own mitten from the pole and lifts up Shauna and wipes her tears.
Shauna’s father comes down the walkway to get her. Then there are the red-headed twins. Finally, there is only Marx.
They are two streets away. The wind is agonizing. Her eyes are filled with tears, which lodge on her eyelashes. Eventually she gives up on the pole line and puts it in her pocket and grabs Marx’s hand.
“We’re almost there,” she says.
He is whispering something through the air filter in his scarf. She leans in and realizes that he is reciting his book, that list of words and phrases that he wrote in all capital letters. DOVE. SKYLINE. HEADPHONES. CAN I GO. CLOCK. CAN YOU SEE IT.
The wind pushes at their backs. She can see his house at the end of the street. “Come on,” she says.
She drags him up the walkway and hammers at his door. It takes a long time before the door is opened by a man who reeks of beer. There are circles under his eyes. He looks confused about why she is here.
“There’s a storm,” she says over the wind.
“Who are you?”
“I’m his Walker. And his teacher.”
“Ah,” he says. “You’re the one who can’t figure out what’s wrong with him.”
He takes Marx inside and closes the door. She hears it lock.
“Don’t go back to the school,” Jotham says. The ash blowing out of his hair nearly chokes her.
She goes three streets to the west, to her own apartment, and she locks the door and wishes she could lock it a second time.
***
On Monday, Marx doesn’t come to school.
On Tuesday, she sits beside his little blue chair at Resource. Jotham sits there, too. She writes out the alphabet for him and he says, “I can’t read that.”
“There’s a lot of that going around.”
“But I’m not broken,” he says. “I’m dead.”
“Ouch.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Bram tells her that Marx isn’t coming back to school. His father feels that he isn’t making progress, and he’s acting out at home, and nobody knows what to do with him. Maybe he’ll be back next year. Maybe not.
On Thursday, June brings her a letter that she says is from Marx. It has a picture of a cow in a field, and it says beneath it, THANK YOU FOR THE STORM.
She knows that he means thank you for what you did during the storm. If he were here, she would tell him to pay more attention to his prepositions.
On Friday, during the lunch break, she pulls her chair to the side of the room and stands up on it and hacks away at the plaster ceiling with her ruler and tears out the lights. She does this all the way around the perimeter of the room, until the plaster has rained down in a halo, and she piles up the lights with their intestinal wires sparking and dying in a tangle. She sits in the little blue chair and looks at the damage in the ceiling and the writhing pile of lights and wires and she waits until they find her. Jotham doesn’t say anything. He just reaches up and brushes his cold hands through her hair and shakes the plaster out of it. It falls like ash onto her shoulders.
Mikaela Hart's short stories and poems have been published by numerous organizations, including the Story Radio Podcast and the Kaleidoscope Undergraduate magazine. She is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in French Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Guelph and will be joining the Masters in French Studies program there in the fall.