Whisper Down the Lane, Clay Chapman [best short books to read txt] 📗

students are still in the dark. No press release from the main office just yet. Kids can’t understand why Miss Castevet is so upset. It won’t be long before some second-grade sleuth puts two and two together. The whispers are already drifting through the faculty now, a brushfire passing from class to class. The teachers’ lounge is festering with speculation and it’s not even fourth period yet. We’ve all become embroiled in detective work, a bunch of amateur Sherlock Holmeses. Elementary school, my dear Watson…

A yummy morsel of gossip like this is too good to pass up. Did you hear? each teacher whispers. Professor Howdy’s been gutted. Torn open along his underbelly, groin to gullet…

It wasn’t until lunch period that word finally reached me.

I pulled cafeteria detail today. That meant surveying the students as they munched their nuggets, like I’m some police guard standing watch over gen pop. Miss Castevet usually takes this shift, but she’d called out, and as the alternate turnkey, I’m on deck to replace her. I honestly thought I’d never get called. Miss Castevet never misses her lunch shift. Never misses anything. She constantly volunteers to chaperone after-school events. This school is her life.

And somebody just gutted it.

“Have you heard?” Mr. Dunstan, our music teacher, murmurs over the lunchtime din. The two of us stand at the back of the cafeteria by the trash cans. Kids dump what is left of their lunch, creating a congealing mound of breaded chicken cutlets and chocolate milk.

“Hear what?”

“Professor Howdy,” he whispers, rather mock conspiratorially, as if the students might be eavesdropping on our conversation. Not that these kids care what us adults natter on about.

Except her.

That girl. Over there. All the way across the cafeteria. Corn-silk blonde hair. She’s looking right at me. I spot her as Mr. Dunstan murmurs into my ear. She’s sitting by herself. The contents of her bagged lunch spread out evenly before her, both hands gripping her sandwich. Just staring back. Not blinking. At least, I think she’s staring. Maybe I am imagining it. Her eyes don’t drift. Perhaps she is gazing into space and I just happen to be in her visual line of fire.

Is she in my class? It’s pretty early in the school year, so getting a lock on everyone’s name is still a hurdle. For me, at least. I’ve always been terrible with names. Names and faces.

Do I have her? I think. I squint to see her. Is that…what’s-her-name.

Her name…

Sandy.

I almost say it loud out. To be honest, I’m not entirely convinced I didn’t. Not from the way Mr. Dunstan is staring at me.

“The rabbit,” he clarifies. He shakes his head and sighs. Such a solemn air. It feels a wee bit performative for my tastes, to be honest. Dunstan is just gunning to play the pipes at the wake. Danny Boy, I bet. Maybe he’ll get his choir kids to sing a song they’ve prepared in class just for Professor Howdy. Perhaps even some choreographed dance routine. With scarves.

“How awful,” he says, already humming the initial strains of some funereal dirge. Dunstan strikes me as a doughy Humpty Dumpty. His oval-shaped torso and bald pate glisten with the thinnest sheen of perspiration. The man is perpetually sweating. Always licking his lips. Always humming an ethereal strain to an unknown song, a symphony hiding behind his lips, seemingly unaware that he’s even doing it. He has left me in suspense for long enough, leaning over and whispering into my ear that someone eviscerated our school’s unofficial mascot.

“They’re saying,” he whispers, his eyes still on the kids, the warmth of his breath spreading down my neck, “it looked ritualistic.”

He doesn’t know I’ve already seen it for myself. That I was the one who discovered the body.

I bike to school. No car for me. I let my license lapse at some point a while back and still haven’t renewed it. There’s a well-furrowed bike path that cuts through the surrounding woods behind the building, allowing kids who live on the south side to Schwinn their way to school. They just have to cut through the soccer field to get here. I can bike to work in ten minutes flat.

This morning was no different. Not until I noticed that patch of white.

Braking, I turned to take in the glistening spectacle. My first thought was the groundskeeper must’ve run the rabbit over with his lawnmower without realizing it. An accident. But the longer I looked, taking in the fastidiousness of the display, the devout attention to detail, the more I saw it as sculpture. A work of art.

I couldn’t shake the creeping feeling that, whoever did this, they’d made it just for me.

It’s all for you, Richard, I heard the rabbit whisper. All for you.

There was a birthday card tucked in his guts. The corners of the cardboard stock were softening with blood, held upright within the ribs’ grip.

Nobody knows it’s my birthday. I choose not to celebrate it, haven’t celebrated it, not even with Tamara, for years. I figured the day had faded by now. Nobody knows. And yet, this sacrificed rabbit felt like a gift. A present someone went ahead and unwrapped without me.

I carefully plucked the card out from Professor Howdy’s rib cage, making sure not to touch any of the blood. It was an old card, printed years ago, yellowing around the edges.

The picture on the front was of a dimple-cheeked baby emerging from a head of lettuce. Leaves unfurled around his pudgy body, this plump infant sprouting out from the soil itself.

A Cabbage Patch Kid.

I haven’t seen one of them in years. These dolls were all the rage when I was a kid. They flew right off the shelves every Christmas. Children were given an adoption certificate with each doll. You had to take an oath to raise them. Kids were instructed to hold up their right hand in front of an adult and pledge, I promise to love my Cabbage Patch Kid with all my heart.

I remember these