Riddance by Shelley Jackson

Author:Shelley Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2018-08-16T16:00:00+00:00

The Stenographer’s Story, contd.

It is customary in telling stories from school, I understand, to include a few rib-tickling accounts of youthful antics. Antics have never been to my taste, but obedient to the genre, I will attempt to put one down.

I was hiding in the bushes, having slipped away from a boisterous game of Enough of Your Lip, in which I had already received four headstones (I was never athletic). I was a city girl, and both open fields and enclosing woods made me uneasy, the first with the thought of watching something approach inexorably from far away, the second, of something creeping close unseen. But the snug green warrens under the bushes felt like a haven. Crouching in the duff, twigs scratching my shoulders, I felt my breath calm, my heart slow.

That I was losing the game was not the only reason I had wanted to be alone. I was hoping to be visited by a ghost: I thought I could feel someone halfway up my throat. Ghost-speaking without a spotter was forbidden, but I did not want the others to see how often and how hard I practiced. My mouth was just arranging itself into an old-fashioned shape when a whisper and a muffled laugh told me that I had been discovered. I crouched lower, screwing my feet into the loose leaves to find firm ground to push off from. Then I burst from under the bush like a jackrabbit, as the visiting spirit—for that is what it was—called out quite loudly and with surprising, but most unwelcome pertinence, “Little Bobby Black-bird sat upon a tree, singing to the pussy-cat, you can’t catch me!”

I followed this with a little mew of dismay, wholly my own, for in fact they could catch me, as I well knew, and give me a drubbing, too.

A little stream, amusingly called a river, took a semicircular bite out of the bottom of the playfield, swung wide around the Chapel, made an exploratory swipe at the back of the school, where several tall trees dropped leaves over a cutbank onto its rippling, spangled surface, then set off toward Cheesehill down a course choked with fallen trees. Eventually it dove between wooded hills and disappeared. More than once I had made a timely escape by splashing through it, leaving my pursuers, who did not care to soak their only pair of shoes, to dance on the far bank. But its winsome limpid shallows could be deadly if another student had you by the back of the neck and was forcing you down, down into the airless rush and glitter . . . I veered back into the bushes. The other boys and girls roared with joyful rage and began thrashing through the thicket toward me.

“Little Bobby Black-bird swimming in the sea,” I caroled, “singing to the pussy-cat, you can’t catch me!”

They caught me, had me, were pulling on my pinafore so hard I fell over backwards. I lay staring up at a ring of mirthful faces and above them swaying leaves against a white indifferent sky.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.