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Ms. Prichard Teaches Us about Evils

by J(ae)D Brames

When Ms. Prichard finally gets here, the EVIL leaps through a closed window into the sparkling outside and we shout, YAY! We drawed the EVIL on the blackboard, which is green, we took turns outlining loads of dragony heads and bad-vacuum legs and a bubbled-out lens body, and we wrote EVIL under. Then we chalked Bobby inside, a leg over there, an arm over here, an eye over there. DISSOLVED. It's not a fun drawing. We didn't draw Ms. Prichard yet, but we drawed Bobby.

We runrunrun back to our desks and sit nice and quiet because Ms. Prichard is a powerful fairy princess who buzzes around between the clouds, she hides her wings under her vest and her sharp-tipped ears under her twirly gold hair. If we're not good she'll turn us into gerbils, like our class pet Prince Pisces.

Only, today, it's tough to sit nice and quiet, one because Bobby is absent, and two because Ms. Prichard is, she's, she's all...

Our fairy godmother is hunched over like a wicked witch, maybe her children stepped on a crack, and her hair is like a broom if a giant squished the bristles. But that's not the worst.

The worst, the most horribly dangerously baddest, is she's smeared brown on her vest and skirt and face, like an ogre swallowed her whole and she held her breath and slided all the way through and out. She got stinky like a broken bathroom vacuum. The streetclean robots would think she's GRIME and suck her right up and burn her, that's how smelly-smeary she is.

We scream, MS. PRICHARD, YOU'RE ALL DIRTY!

Ms. Prichard sort of sits-stands on the front of her humongous desk, with her arms crossed, which is a magic spell that means BE QUIET AND GET SCARED OF BEING PUNISHED, and it works. While we're quiet, we can hear the spirit frogs croaking their WHEEEE croak that keeps all the skeeters and stuff out of our sparkling city so no one gets DISEASE. Ms. Prichard wrote DISEASE on the greenboard to teach us what it used to be, but it's not real anymore so then she erased it.

We hear the streetclean robots, and we look out the row of windows, the sun's out so that's OK, and so are the adults. Some of our parents are out there, in case. We can see our houses from here, that's where our blankets are. The robots are adult-size shiny domes rolling between the non-parent adults running.

We ask Ms. Prichard if we can go wash. She looks like if she told God to close its eye and stop sunshining, God would be too scared to keep its eye open. We can hear angels tapping their feet on the ground, feeling what it's like to be us. We can hear Glub the Bogey in the coat closet, sniffing around our coats, looking for wrappered food pellets.

Then she says, "This is not easy for me, class. I like the stories we tell. I like feeling safe with you. But today we must separate myth from the more difficult truth."

She pushes her hair back, not enough to see her fairy ears. The vacuums come on in their floor grates, trying to make the smell and DIRT sucked away, but the smell and DIRT are Ms. Prichard. We're wishing upon a star to wash, to scrub our hands and faces in the sink and stand in a-bio mist-bath and feel good. After we play, even just waiting for Ms. Prichard, our faces and hands are brown streaks like hers, only we don't smell like babydiaper though.

Over at the greenboard, with her stick of stiff fairy dust, she spells TRUTH.

We say, TRUTH.

On the EVIL we drawed, she points to the pieces inside.

"This is meant to be Bobby?" she says. It's right there in our minds, she can see into us and knows when we didn't do the reading and when we think Bobby's DISSOLVED. We know what DISSOLVED means because she wrote it on the board so we'd repeat it so we'd learn it.

She picks up the eraser but doesn't erase the Bobby pieces. It's an enchanted eraser, it can erase anything. Like it erased the other gerbils we used to have when Prince Pisces was a baby. That's why we drawed the EVIL and why we pretended it tried to run when she got here.

We ask for clean water and a-bio mist.

"No washing today," she says, and we look down our DIRTY undernails, which are caves for DISEASE, and we don't touch the GRIMY lines where our fingers bend. We smell Ms. Prichard and wish we could lie down and let the robots streetclean us good.

Ms. Prichard spells SANTA. We say, SANTA.

Poof and abracadabra! SANTA walks in.

We say, HI, SANTA, and we want to sit on his lap so we can ask if he'll make the EVILS stop falling from the sky and DISSOLVING people, and ask to be good and wash up. SANTA is bent low like the neck of a golden goose, his beard is clean and thick like mist-bath. He says HO HO HO, but it doesn't come from his jelly belly.

"Santa Claus," Ms. Prichard says. "Flies around the world in one night, delivering presents. No. Sorry."

She yanks the mist-bath beard down and down and off.

"You all know Mr. Raulsie, our librarian," Ms. Prichard says. Mr. Raulsie likes to read us stories about tiny DISEASY DIRT MONSTERS and why we had to pave the GRASS and why trees and gerbils only grow in special houses with lots of vacuums. SANTA is Mr. Raulsie. "People like Mr. Raulsie dress up and pretend for you. Your parents buy you the presents."

Mr. Raulsie, not SANTA, says sorry to us, and on his way out he mumbles other stuff.

"No, Mr. Raulsie," Ms. Prichard says, "no a-bio misting for you. And none for you, either," she says to us, even us ones whose parents got DISSOLVED.

Ms. Prichard takes the enchanted eraser and rubs out SANTA.

But she doesn't erase Bobby in the EVIL.

God's eye is open outside, looking for a HERO, seeing our parents. The adults move fast lately, us kids run everywhere but it's funny to see adults running everywhere. A shadow jumps up the school steps, but it's only a huge dragon that could eat one of us as easily as we could unwrap a food pellet. Ms. Prichard spells PRINCE PISCES on the greenboard, we say, PRINCE PISCES, not loud, our fingers open wide so there's no cracks for DIRT to fall into.

She goes to the window and takes PRINCE PISCES out of his cage. He's got a bubbled tube maze and spinny wheel and dry pellets and a vacuum floor, his whole cursed kingdom that used to be a big castle with trees that grew outside in piles of DIRT, and with KNIGHTS who fought dragons and got GRIMY faces then walked all the way home to the castle GRIMY and got DISEASE and made everyone DISEASY and they all died. PRINCE PISCES sits in Ms. Prichard's GRIMY palm and wiggles his nose at her. She reads his mind, that's the only way to understand a gerbil, even one that's a cursed prince.

Ms. Prichard says, "I told you he was a prince under a spell, and that only a kiss can change him back."

She kisses the gerbil. She gets him DIRTY, and PRINCE PISCES wiggles his nose and searches her palm for a-bio and doesn't get real big real fast and have a floppy hat and poofy pants and stockings like in books Mr. Raulsie reads us. PRINCE PISCES stays a gerbil.

"Class pet, nothing more," says Ms. Prichard. She puts him back in his cage and his vacuum floor whirrs up but she shuts it off, and at the greenboard Ms. Prichard rubs out PRINCE.

The hourly mist-bath hisses into the classroom, and Ms. Prichard fairy-squeaks and runs to the door, where the switch is, and flicks off the sprayers, which clicks off the lights. Now the room's full of shadows, and we're in some of them.

We stare at the door to the hall, to the hall to the bathroom with the mist-bath that'll make us sparkle like good girls and boys, we want to run there, we're in shadows and Glub the Bogey eats children in shadows, blankets are safety, GLUB is the sound you hear when he swallows you. Like with EVILS, you DISSOLVE.

Ms. Prichard spells SPIRIT FROGS. We say, SPIRIT FROGS. She reaches into her desk and pulls out a star shape, where instead of points there's funnels. "They're machines that emit high-pitched noises to keep insects away. Most insects can't hurt you." She erases SPIRIT FROGS.

She spells, STORK. We say STORK. "Your parents did not wish upon a star for you, and this bird didn't deliver you to them. You grew in your mom's belly and she gave birth, the same way Pisces was born from our last class pet, Queen Capricorn, who was not a real queen." She erases STORK.

If we weren't scared to move we'd make a run for it, straight to clean water and a-bio. Just sitting here, we've gotten GRIMY. When the hourly spray fills the sparkling streets, we want to jump out the windows like the greenboard EVIL.

Ms. Prichard is going to open the closet in the almost-dark. She can't turn us into gerbils or put us on the Naughty List or send us back with the stork, so if she wants to keep hurting us she'll have to open the closet.

Ms. Prichard spells GLUB.

We whisper, GLUB.

"There is no bogey in our or any closet," she says. "That's a particularly mean lie, not one of mine, but I played along when I shouldn't have. The sound you hear is water and a-bio pipes behind the walls. Glub is only another student in the bathroom, washing up."

She erases GLUB.

It's not fair. She'll fly back to fairyland tonight and laugh with the fairy king, and we'll lie in bed in the dark and poke our feet out of the blankets, and we'll be thinking about bogeys who pretended to be in our closets, when really they're in the bathroom getting clean, like good girls and boys.

The a-bio mist-bath clears outside, and we see Mr. Raulsie walking by in his red suit.

Shadows climb the sparkling buildings. Sunlight doesn't slide back in behind them. The shadows are not dragons or clean rain. They're looking for GOOD so they can DISSOLVE it.

We point outside up at the whooshing white clouds that swallow the tops of no-more-sparkling buildings, and we shout, RUN! THE EVILS!

But Ms. Prichard jumps in front of the door. We're in a great-big closet. There's nothing in the closet but water. "Stay in your seats," she says. And she says, "They're not cursed rain, they're not here to punish you for being bad or dirty. Would you like to know what happened to Bobby?"

No. We don't wanna know. We wanna not get DISSOLVED.

Pisces sees the shadows and crawls into his bubbled tubes. The sunshining eye of God, if it is an eye or a God, is closed.

"One of them got him last night," Ms. Prichard says, and we beg to bathe, we plead to leave. "It swallowed him up. I could see him inside the bubble, pleading to me. But there was nothing I could do."

Ms. Prichard pulls back her hair. Her ears are not fairy-tipped. They're round flaps of ear, just like ours.

Silvery rain starts to fall outside. They are the rain, and it puddles in the mostly adultless street and rises and rises in big bubbles, and out pop swishing bubble legs and loads of dragony bubble heads. Their bodies are shiny lenses, we can see the gray world through them, turned upsidedown.

Ms. Prichard beats her fist on the greenboard. There is almost not enough light to see her.

"But, children, Bobby isn't dead." She beats our drawing of Bobby pieces. "This never happened."

We're crying. It's making our cheeks DIRTY, and we wipe them with our GRIMY hands, so we look around and see we're all as bad as Ms. Prichard.

"I used to be a child," Ms. Prichard says. "I was just like you. I could wash and wash a thousand times a day, and ten minutes later I'd be filthy again. My hands, my face. Under my fingernails. Between my toes. Always filthy. As though it came right out of my pores."

Ms. Prichard pushes her gigantic desk against the classroom door.

Then she starts opening windows.

Outside, EVILS float around like big leggy bubblebath bubbles and look more magical than Pisces or Santa. People get sucked up the bubble legs, and their parts come all apart. When you see people in there, you can't hear any screaming, but you can see from their faces that you should.

Our parents are knocking on the door. We try to run to them, we're screaming, but the desk is superheavy, and Ms. Prichard wouldn't erase the EVIL from the board. There are screams outside, too, but then they go GLUB. We try to fit under the desk but we can't, we crawl over each other like gerbils and make ourselves more DIRTY. It's coming right out of our pores. If Ms. Prichard could really read our minds, she wouldn't do what she's doing.

"They're not EVIL," Ms. Prichard shouts. Behind her are open windows, and behind them are living gerbil tubes with real curses. "They eat us because they're hungry. They like us because we're spotless, disinfected, we wash and spray and immunize, we take nutrition in pill form and excrete waste into vacuums—have you ever even heard of 'napkins' or 'toilet paper'? We're sparkling clean all the time. But not you kids. A bit of play, some fearful sweat, and you're filthy again. It's part of being a kid. That's what saved Bobby. That's what'll save the world.

"I'm sorry, class, but I'm telling you the TRUTH."

EVILS gloop in through the windows. They get Ms. Prichard. We scream, and then we GLUB, and the room fills with DISSOLVING water. We float inside, frozen by the jellyness of the bubble bodies, waiting to have to silent-scream.

It comes off our faces. It comes out of the lines on our hands. It comes out from our undernails and covers us like blankets. The EVILS start to turn like that bathwater under the bubbles, like the wash water that swishes in the sink before vacuums suck it away. DIRTY, brownish jellyness in the classroom, the color of the GRIME smeared on Ms. Prichard. It comes right out of our pores, and it DISSOLVES right into the EVILS.

We hear a glubby, rumbly kind of scream, and then the EVIL water pours out of the windows and pours brownish into the sky. The white clouds get dark, and the sunlight peeks out, even Pisces is safe, and Ms. Prichard is safe, and we're safe. We and the greenboard are clean.

J(ae)D Brames (brjady@yahoo.com) has an unorthodox name, and for that he really must apologize. He's grateful to the Atomjack crew and its readers for giving Ms. Prichard's students a good home, and only asks that they be allowed to stay up late on Saturdays, that they only be forced to shower once a week, and that they be encouraged to prefer imagination over reality for as long as possible.