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The god of back to school never ages. Six-years-old, every September she gets new shoes, shiny black patent with straps. They don’t get much wear — she can fly instead of walk or will her mind with its mostly good intentions to show up at the gates to nudge the children in. The hesitant ones she bribes with bag lunches. Inside each there’s a pellet of ambrosia wrapped in foil, a bottle of water fizzing with starry electrolytes, and a jawbreaker that blackens the mouth, at its centre the seed that grows into a dangerous desire to learn.
It’s the teachers this god worries about the most — the ones who hang back, outside the school their legs suddenly as heavy as posts that support an ocean pier.
The woman who despairs she’s said it all before, sits in her car in the lot, head on the steering wheel, a resignation letter sitting in the glove box like a gun. The god of back to school, bodiless now, becomes the voice that whispers in her ear, “You felt this last year, you felt this the year before, just get to the classroom, walk to the front, write your name on the blackboard, turn to the desks and say I am your teacher.
“Few in the heavenly spheres are allowed to say these words. Just me, the god of the unexpected, and the god of grief. They like you are not used to being listened to but they stand tall when they speak, their tongues shining with the beauty of what those words in any language, holy or otherwise, might mean.”
The woman will hold onto this message until she sees the faces raised in her direction — the eager, the sullen, the unmarred, the beaten-down. Then the god and her words will disappear. It will be the children’s faces that save her. She’ll get to work, with pencils and notebooks, nods and prompts, a row of letters marching across the top of the blackboard, and one plus one plus one.
Next year, the first day of school, she’ll be sitting in her car again, head on the steering wheel, the weight of every book of rhyming verse she’s ever used in class anchoring her in the driver’s seat, in the glove box the letter with its safety off, and when she looks up, something flickering at the edge of her vision, she’ll see across the parking lot a girl in black patent shoes seeming to float toward her, and could it be an apple, the first apple in the world, glowing like a lantern in her hand? ![[Tyee]](/design-article.thetyee.ca/ui/img/yellowblob.png){kind=small}
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