Red Snow

On days like today, Taci tried to remember how much she used to like her job. She sat behind her desk, hands clasped in front of her, trying to bring out the shining, white grin that the parents of Personville students had come to expect and love. It wouldn’t come. Instead she shuffled through her notes, thinking about what she would say to each couple at today’s parent-teacher conference. She reflected on the observations she had made on each child and, in doing so, thought about the carefully curated half-truths that the notes represented. She tried to think about what she was going to say, but could only think about the things she was leaving out.

Melissa Burbidge, Taci’s only assistant, popped her head into the classroom’s doorway. Blond and white, Melissa was both on the opposite side of the color spectrum from Taci and a template for everyone else in town. That had caused some tension when Taci had first arrived, placed here by the State Department’s refugee program, but her skills as a teacher and administrator had quickly earned Melissa’s respect. Taci liked to think that was true of the whole town, knew that it wasn’t, and couldn’t care less anymore. Her mind was on bigger concerns.

“The Hendersons are here,” Melissa announced with a cheerfulness that would have been evident even if her smile wasn’t beaming through the doorway. Taci tried to return it, felt her own smile falter, returned to reflexively shuffle her notes again. “Please send them in.” As Melissa was only part-time, she hadn’t seen the things Taci had seen, so her smile came as easily and honestly as it always had.

Mrs. Henderson, appearing very much like an older model of Melissa, stepped in, but couldn’t help but wave a hand in front of her nose as she did. “My! How do you put up with the smell, Taci?”

“Margaret!” Mr. Henderson softly reprehended his wife, sounding more like a father than husband, which Ms. Henderson ignored.

“What, George? It’s not like Taci can’t smell it.” She turned back towards Taci and gave her a mock whisper in a conspiratorial tone. “Is the chemical plant? Or the power station?”

With her question, Ms. Henderson had listed the two primary reasons for the existence of Personville. Both the plant and the station provided resources the surrounding state needed. It was, however, an incontrovertible fact that the wind direction directly impacted the olfactory quality of the air surrounding the school. The summer heat hadn’t improved things.

“Margaret!” Mr. Henderson said, this time more embarrassed for himself.

“What? It’s not like we don’t know where that smell is coming from. Besides, it can’t be worse than...” Ms. Henderson stopped for a moment, then in quieter tone to Taci, “I’m sorry, dear, where is it your from?”

“Uganda,” Taci said, quick enough that the name of her home country became a single syllable.

“Well, it can’t be any worse than Uganda.” While Taci could not summon her real smile of late, she found she was, in that moment, able to conjure its plastic facsimile, bring it out as Mr. Henderson hid his face in his hand and Melissa disappeared from the doorway.

“Perhaps we should,” Taci began politely, but was interrupted by her student’s mother.

“Yes! Let’s talk about how Johnny is doing.”

At the mention of the Henderson’s son, Taci found the plastic smile frozen in place, her hands unmoving as they clasped her notes. What would she say?

As time in the classroom dilated around that unanswered question the smiles of the Hendersons’ elongated as well. The side-eye the two parents began to give each other was eventually enough to bring Taci out of her indecision, clearing her throat and shuffling her papers. “With the pandemic pushing the school year into the summer, all of the children have faced challenges,” she began, trying to hew to the truth. “This is especially true of Johnny. He’s very sociable and the other students enjoy him, but he has difficulty focusing in class and can become...” Taci was stopped by the memory of Johnny at his desk, hiding behind the lift-lid, the masticating sounds emanating from behind it becoming louder as Taci had approached.

Taci snapped out of the revery, pulling herself from it before her mind could take her over the horizon of Johnny’s desk. “A challenge” she pronounced the words as a period to her last sentence. Uncertain of what else to share, she stopped.

Not surprisingly, the Hendersons both had the long faces of disappointed parents, which was preferable to the angry option that was sometimes the alternative to such news. “Oh,” Mrs. Henderson said, quietly, after a moment. “We’re sorry to hear that.” In routine times this would be the part of the conversation in which Taci assured the parents this was normal, that children at Johnny’s age often had trouble focusing, and that with assistance from home it could be rectified.

She stayed silent. The quiet that Taci held in her mouth, hard between her teeth, began to expand to take up the space of the room, no matter how much she tried to hold it inside. Unable to bear it for very long, Mr. Henderson began to squirm uncomfortably in his chair when Mrs. Henderson asked, “How did this start?”

“It started on the playground,” Taci answered automatically, thinking of the black top that doubled as a parking lot, with its painted lines that could be divided for hopscotch or used for four-square or as guidance on where to arrange your vehicle in relation to others. Watching the children laugh and run and scream along the tarmac had always been one of Taci’s favorite parts of the job. Until yesterday.

From underneath the awning of the school’s back entrance Taci had been watching the children chase each other, enjoying her one cigarette of the day. When she was certain no mischief was at hand, she snuck glimpses at the sky. Her young life had been spent in a village surrounded by tall trees that covered the horizon, but here, in the wide parcel between plant and station, it felt to her like you could see all of the sky, as wide and open as a mother’s arms.

It also meant she could see it when the chemical plant had belched out a red cloud. As it rose into the sky, she heard the faint sound of distant klaxons begin shortly after the cloud’s emission. Even as far away as it was, Taci prepared to call the children in early. But then the cloud began to move, shifting up and out away from the chemical plant, catching Taci’s eye in a way that held her in place. On the short hairs of her scalp she felt the wind blow and could see the cloud travel in the opposite direction. Towards the school.

This snapped Taci out of her thrall and she opened her mouth to order the children inside. Before a word could leave her, though, the cloud crossed the thick set of transmission lines from the power plant and thunder exploded. Everyone jumped at the booming, turning to the power lines as the cloud dissipated in a cacophony of lightening and noise. Sitting in her classroom with the Hendersons, Taci cursed her own slack-jawed slowness as the red cloud had dispersed in that electric storm, spreading out across the wide prairie sky.

Everyone, children and teacher, had been struck dumb by the galvanizing event that took place in the sky above the school that day. Each of them had stood in awe as electricity and thunder were thrown out of the quickly disappearing crimson cloud. From under the awning, Taci had felt the cigarette fall out of her hands, mouth open, watching the unexplained event.

This awe had only allowed her to watch as the thunder quieted and a gentle snow began to fall out of the now cloudless sky. A red snow. As Taci watched in a growing, paralyzed horror, the children became quickly covered in the ruby precipitation, dancing and laughing at the sudden change, opening their mouths to the sky to let it all in.

It was only later, after Taci had gotten everyone back inside and relatively dried off that she noticed the glint in her students eyes as they watched her at the blackboard, the predaceous smiles as they tracked her movements back and forth. It wasn’t until later that she discovered the dead bird that Johnny had snuck in from recess and hidden behind his desk.

“It started on the playground,” Taci repeated, unable to continue beyond that.

Both Mrs. & Mr. Henderson stared at Taci, unsure of what to make of the mundane statement and the strange look in her eyes. After a few moments, Mrs. Henderson said, “I get the feeling there’s something you’re not telling us.” Tact opened her mouth to try and continue, but before she did Mrs. Henderson asked, “Would it help if we brought Johnny in?”

The question brought Taci out of her dysfunction with a spark of fear. “He’s here?”

The Hendersons nodded, slowly and with confusion. “Yes, dear. He’s right outside.”

With the pandemic, Taci had become accustom to being afraid of her students to some extent, each of them a possible vector for a little known disease. Now, though, with the summer heat pressing in and the red snow lying heavily on her memory, she felt an entirely different kind of fear that only allowed for a, “What?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Henderson nodded assuringly. “He told us you wanted us to bring him in for today’s conference.” Mrs. Henderson glanced at her husband, seeking confirmation, then back at Taci. “All of the parents did.”

Taci felt her eyes slowly widen as she stood from her desk, her hands grasping at its edges as her body strained against her commands to move. Under the increasing confusion of the Henderson’s, Taci reached her full height, then bolted out of the room, her loose skirt flapping with the quickness of the exertion.

Out in the hallway, gathered on either side of the classroom door, the children stood, each tightly holding onto their parents’ hands. Taci heard one mother say, “You’re hurting me, dear.”

From the other room, Taci heard Mrs. Henderson ask, “What’s wrong, Taci?”

Feeling Johnny’s sharp presence behind her, flanking the classroom door, Taci could only exhale. She turned to him to see his grin grow into a bright red smile, filled with more tiny teeth than could fit into a little boy’s mouth.