Sidney Taylor
It starts with sweat. Soaking your brow, seeping back into your skin (no wonder you have acne). Your gym-mates shuffle around you like a you are the coin dropped into a pile of fire ants. Close of course, avoiding contact at all costs. The smell of the orchestra room pollinates itself from the wooden floor to your nose, which gusts the smell of your preschool to…well your nose again.
Lead. In your hand. During your run you remember legit lead pencils were once acceptable. Acceptable like the asbestos in the floor you are educationally mandated to disturb. Why was there lead in your hand?
It’s Montessori, circa 2003. Good lord you’re old as fuck! The smell of grass and the residue of deboned dandelions coating your hands grace you with a gentle waft. Sit contently in the shaded sand. Gritty, dirty dish water color sand. No shade and it would burn. Burn. Your eyes burn, everything appears to be filtered through a grey film, with tears and flecks sprinkled about the image like…well like sprinkles.
No. No. No. Where were you when the lead was in your hand? The asbestos was in the building, not the playground. Inhale the fumes of the floor deep, it will come back to you.
Hole punched paper squares scattered across the foot high table. Take another whiff. You played train conductor and then there was a fucking pencil in your hand. Why in the fresh hell was there a pencil in your hand??? Smell harder. Nope. Can’t remember the blood. Just the blue scraps spread about, and the shock more than terror. Why was there a pencil in your hand?
Sand. It was the cheap sand in your eyes dummy. Sand didn’t put a pencil in your hand. No, but now who put the sand in your eyes? The old man gym teacher, legs shamelessly spread apart displaying the dress code not friendly shorts, hollers at you to keep running. Breathe in more.
Alex. Alex put the sand in your eyes. Not put, that implies a delicate energy, like a pink fairy casting a charm on a princess. He chucked the sand into your zoned out, porcelain skin, sickly, underweight child face. Then it caked your eyes. The dick! You’ll show him. Oh. Oh wait a second…yep he put the lead in your hand too.
Concrete. You clawed the sand out of your face (then dandelions due didn’t help). Your favorite hero was the hulk. You’d bide your time, let the wretch torment others with shoe stomped sand and dusty wood-chips. You stood in line as tall as your petite yet still gangly body would allow, and picked grass. Alex bothered you one last time. You pushed his bitch ass to the ground, to the uncracked preschool tuition funded concrete.
Your run is done. You taste blood in your mouth (blood from gums, lungs, or from unintentionally huffing asbestos, who cares). The same blood as the unseen blood at the scene, of Alex’s revenge of your revenge from Alex throwing sand into your gray-blue eyes.