A Ringing in Her Ears

The school bus barreled down the desert road, a glowing spectacle of reflected sunlight on its way to the Grand Canyon. Mrs. Maloney gazed upon the infinite swaths of blurred sepia as they passed by. This is all my doing, she thought. All of it.

A month ago, a siege had begun on her consciousness that felt akin to an awakening, a constant barrage of prayers from the world’s believers, all packaged differently – questions, statements, pleas in every language – but all understood by her and all circling around a shared point of pain.

A month ago, on a Monday, Mrs. Maloney woke up as God.

The beginning was strenuous, and the prayers piled up the second she opened her mind’s door, but over time, they’d become grains of sand blanketing the vast landscape of her subconscious, awaiting an answer in the palm of her hand. She found it difficult to prioritize any prayer when an entire universe awaited rediscovery. But the guilt could not get pushed aside.

A cacophony of pre-adolescent innocence inside the bus: Timmy and Andre in the back row, playing hand tennis with an eager audience gasping in glee at each smack and scream. Rusty in a middle row, licking a window on a dare. And a disruption tearing her away from her painted land: an attempted war chant: “99 bottles of beer on the wall,” sliced in half by an aggressive “shhh” from Mr. Schwartz.

He’d been forced, in the mad dash of seating, into the left side of the bus when James Kane slid right past him into the seat next to Mrs. Maloney, and in his awkward moment of realization, he’d mumbled something about disrespectful kids and plopped down with a dismissive wave of his hand. The anger in his shushing surprised her. She watched him stick the side of his thumb into his mouth and nibble at it through a frown.

She looked down upon James. He sat stolid, elbows balanced on his thighs, holding his head upon two clasped hands. His bus buddy had shaken him off with a “snooze you lose, dummy,” in a sprint to his crush’s side and committed the gravest sin of elementary school friendship: infidelity.

“I’m the fastest kid in my grade,” he said into his hands.

James was not the fastest kid in his grade. A month’s worth of omniscience and a half-year’s worth of recess proved it to Mrs. Maloney. He wasn’t even close. She knew he knew it too. You can only lose so many races before a realization sets in. He wished he was the fastest kid in the grade. And a wish was a step on the ladder of a prayer.

A prayer.

“I’m the fastest kid in my grade,” he said again, this time louder, overtaking the sounds of the bus in an obvious way.

Mrs. Maloney took a second to break concentration and stare into the furious flames of James’ hair. Tufts of red lifted with each bump in the road, each stray strand struggling mightily against the air-conditioned wind huffing back from the front of the bus.

“The fastest,” he said.

“You are,” she said. “Let it be so.” She ruffled his flames and felt the burning of Creation hum in the palm of her hand. James was her child. As was Mr. Schwartz, the rest of the bus, the driver. Everyone. She smiled at him.

James looked up at her with wide, spongey eyes and smiled back.

“Sweet.”

She nodded, said, “Sweetness, James, is a laughter of a uhm,” and a high-pitched tinnitus axed her thoughts in half. She slapped at her ears to make it stop, and it did. “Sweetness is laughter.” The weight of everything was catching up to her. Closing her eyes, she pressed her forehead to the window and watched the desert pass by.

Mr. Schwartz took advantage of her distraction, reached across the aisle, and tapped James’ shoulder. James, flinching for a fist, looked for the source and, finding Mr. Schwartz with a smile on his face, relaxed and let his shoulders fall down from his ears.

“Hey, Mr. Schwah.”

A tsktsktsk. “Call me Mr. Schwartz.”

“Oh. Sorry. Mr. Schwartz. Hi, Mr. Schwartz.”

He leaned closer to James’ ear.

“I’m faster than you.”

James laughed and looked over his shoulder, into the back of the bus for a camera, a laughing bully, anything to make this make sense – to make it a joke – but found no such reprieve.

Mr. Schwartz had spent each lunch of the past school year running laps around the building, sucking in and sprinting past Mrs. Maloney’s classroom. Turkey slices between classes as his meals. He was fit. He was fast. The hard work should’ve culminated on this bus trip. He should be halfway home with Mrs. Maloney at this moment. But James.

“James. I’m way faster than you.”

“But I’m the fastest kid in my grade--”

The tension broke through the landscape and itched something in Mrs. Maloney’s subconscious enough to illicit a half-hearted, “There, there,” alongside a lazy shoulder pat on his shoulder. Mr. Schwartz waited for the consolation’s passing and leaned back in the second her hand fell again to her lap.

“--Mrs. Maloney said so.”

“I guess I’m faster than the fastest kid in your grade then,” he said, sandwiched in scoffs.

A prayer repeated, and a break from the desert: “Let it be so,” said Mrs. Maloney.

A gasp of exasperation escaped from James. He looked at her, open-mouthed and wild-eyed, with unholstered accusation dripping from his pores.

“But. I’m. faster. than him!” he said.

She waved her hand. “Let it be so.”

Mr. Schwartz stood up in his seat, but he was taller than the roof. He bashed his head and stood at a half-squat, one knee resting on the seat.

How to balance the squabbles of her children? To look upon her desert was to look upon Time itself, a million years in the picture frame of a passing bus window, saved in her mind and settled forever. In the grand scheme of Everything, this moment was meaningless. But to categorize it as such in her mind was to become apathetic to the needs of her children.

Because the prayers pile up.

She turned in her seat to face them, pivoting with her right leg and sliding her left underneath herself. Her knee bumped into James, and he scooted toward the aisle, realized he’d bridged a small gap to Mr. Schwartz, and scooted back, his hip pinched underneath her.

“You are both the fastest.”

“But Mrs. Maloney--” said James.

“--that’s not possible,” said Mr. Schwartz.

She smiled upon them and chuckled. “Anything is possible. You both say you’re the fastest; therefore, you are. Yet. Uhm. Yet. Uhm.” A windstorm on the beach, and the settled prayers inundated her yet again, joining forces with the newcomers, and pierced through her thoughts. She rubbed the spot between her brows and tried to settle them.

“Mrs. Maloney?” asked James.

She grimaced and growled.

Mr. Schwartz propped himself up onto his seat. “Katie.”

Who does God pray to when under duress? She had nowhere to go but herself. She breathed deep, caught a prayer in her head, and answered it swiftly before moving onto the next. Satiated, the rest settled back into place and allowed her to think clearly again. Her eyes opened up like blinds after a long sleep. A small headache persisted in the background.

“Where were we?”

“I’m faster than James,” said Mr. Schwartz.

Mrs. Maloney laughed and playfully wagged a finger at him. “No, but thank you for reminding me.”

James had turned to scold Mr. Schwartz, but in the action, twisted his hip and twinged a nerve in Mrs. Maloney’s thigh, and she yelped with a “Shit!” backward toward the window. “Sorry.” She reached for his hand, and he gave it. “If you feel the need to test my words, then test my words. Otherwise, the speed is settled. You are both the fastest.”

They said, “Race,” in unison as the bus came to a stop.

The sun – her sun – was a blessing despite the pain it carried into her head. The bus had been cold, and the desert was a thawing thing. She stretched her legs and hiked to their spot, knowing her children would follow, and they did. Her back to the Grand Canyon and standing in a fenced cul-de-sac vantage point off the trail, she faced Mr. Schwartz and James and all her students. Her arms were open wide.

“Everything I have done, I have done for all of you.”

The kids, for the most part, kicked rocks.

“Some see this great chasm as a flaw in the design of things, a flaw in the. Uhm.” The noise, the pain, an unraveling brain. “Design of things.” She turned around and breathed in her masterpiece. Her children would wait for the pain to subside.

In Mrs. Maloney’s moment, James spread the news. The crowd grew eager, a buzzing, mumbling momentum took over and soon overpowered the prayers spinning in her head. She turned back to them with a clear head.

“There are no flaws when perfection is blended with intention, as no flaws exist in any of you.”

A pulsing chant. An alive thing.

“--Race. Race. Race. Race. Race--”

Another wind in her mind, the prayers lifted in a gust. “Embrace the chasm as it—”

“---Race. Race. Race. Race—”

Another prayer before her, tangible. Answerable in the immediate.

“You desire a race. So be it.”

The students flooded in behind James and Mr. Schwartz as both of them knelt in uncomfortable imitations of a running stance. Mrs. Maloney at the finish line, arms still wide, the rest of them down the trail. A yell, a scrambled start, Mr. Schwartz bursting out of his position and taking a substantial lead, holding onto it for the moment. Pride escaping James in the dust behind him, and desperate, mad panic replacing it. He was the fastest. It was said and agreed upon. A grunt, a future scar as present bite marks underneath his lower lip, and James caught up with a light push of Mr. Schwartz’s hip. Their minds moved faster than their feet now, and top-heavy, they stumbled. Arms flailed. Mrs. Maloney grimaced as they turned the corner into her eyeline and brought her arms in, close to herself. James fell face-first into the dirt and dragged his chin and torso and kneecaps on the rocks. Mr. Schwartz propelled himself forward, toward Mrs. Maloney and the finish line, still several strides away. The ball of his foot caught a rock, and he slipped, gasping and reaching for her, but she stepped to the side, and he plunged into the wooden fence beyond her, shattering the rails, careening into the void.

The children ran up the trail and stepped on James, pushing his chin deeper into the dirt. Mrs. Maloney opened again her arms and hurried to meet them, but they ran around her to the edge.

Mr. Schwartz was gone, disappeared to the bottom somewhere, replaced with a tornado of sobering electricity that a death of such absurdity left behind itself.

No sound but the wind.

The kids, aching from an anticipation that led nowhere but the feeling of rocks and shards of wood pressing into their knees, went to James and helped him up. The group of them wandered back down to the bus alone.

Mrs. Maloney walked to the precipice. The consequences of creation, she thought. To live was to die, and the loss of Mr. Schwartz, in this moment, was terrible, but it would pass, as would the Grand Canyon in a million small erosive ways over the course of eternity, and she saw the beauty in that. She was the beauty in that.

This is all my fault, she thought, wrapping the thread of Time around her finger. All of it.

And a ringing in her ears.