The Joker's Wilde by Brandon Faircloth

Author:Brandon Faircloth [Faircloth, Brandon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

The Spider Baby

I’d been a student-teacher at Rawlings Elementary for two months when I first heard about Spider Baby.

I spent most of my time at the school (every Thursday and Friday except for when I had exams) with my assigned second-grade teacher, Mrs. Pittman. She was an older lady that had taught for over twenty-five years, and my first impression had been that she was burned out and ready to retire. She could come across as gruff and uncaring at times, making harsh proclamations about this child or that, handing out rewards and punishments with the ruthless efficiency of someone running a factory rather than a classroom. But as I got to know her better, I saw the love and respect she had for the children and that they had for her in return. She was also an excellent teacher—I learned more from her in a week than from being in school all semester, and as time went on, I began to understand that I still had a lot left to learn.

Part of knowing Mrs. Pittman was understanding that she was unflappable not because she didn’t care, but because she had seen everything already. This was her twenty-sixth group of seven year-olds, and everything that seemed novel and interesting to me was old hat to her. My second week there, a child came back from gym with a broken wrist. The girl was crying and I was panicked, but Mrs. Pittman just took the girl’s other hand and led her down to the office, distracting her with a story that had the child giggling before she was out of earshot. Nothing seemed to trouble her or catch her by surprise.

I think that’s why it caught my attention that day out on the playground. We were watching our class and two others for afternoon recess, and for the last ten minutes, we’d been sitting in fairly comfortable silence while watching the kids play and glancing at our phones. That’s when I heard her mutter under her breath.

“Goddamn Spider Baby.”

I glanced up and looked at Mrs. Pittman with surprise. Not because she’d cursed—she frequently talked like a sailor when the kids weren’t in earshot. And only partially because of the oddness of what she said. I had no idea of what a “spider baby” might be.

No, it was because of how she said it. I could hear frustration and irritation in her voice, but it sounded like they were sharing space with something else that was darker and more alien. She sounded a little nervous, or possibly even afraid. Looking at her face, the expression there was thin-lipped and unreadable, and before I could ask what she was talking about, she was on her feet and calling to the kids.

“My class! Get away from there. Come here. My class, come to me right now.”

I looked out and noticed that most of our class was clumped at the far edge of the playground. More precisely, they were ten or twenty feet into the woods that lay at the playground’s edge.

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