"Bruno and His Classmates" by Sophie Anne Hinkson

Today on Midwest Weird: "Bruno and His Classmates,” by Sophie Anne Hinkson.

Sophie Ann Hinkson relocated to Chicago from Paris a few years ago. In France, she worked as a bookseller and journalist for a literary magazine and radio station. She is now teaching ESL and French at various colleges in Chicago. She holds an MA in Modern Literature from France and is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at UC Riverside’s Low Residency Program. She lives in Chicago with her husband, one cat, and six pet rats.

Midwest Weird is an audio literary magazine from Broads and Books Productions. We’re the home of weird fiction and nonfiction by Midwestern writers.

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Episode Transcript:

This is Midwest Weird, an audio literary magazine from Broads and Books Productions.

We’re the home of weird fiction and nonfiction by Midwestern writers.

Today’s episode: “Bruno and His Classmates,” by Sophie Anne Hinkson. Read by the Midwest Weird team.

Bruno was in class when he died. It happened at the end of the second morning period, a few minutes before lunch break. Deirdre, the substitute teacher wasn’t really thinking about anything, immersed in the cottony acoustic created by the fresh fallen snow. The absence of sound had found its way inside, through the cracks of the elementary school’s old stoney walls, giving Deirdre’s classroom a peaceful atmosphere. That might be the reason why Bruno decided to let go.

Nobody saw him take his last breath, as he was resting his head on the flat surface of his student desk. The middle-schoolers were working on their math problems, the teacher was looking outside. At some point, Deirdre wondered if she would finally meet somebody on this weird island. Meanwhile, Bruno’s face was stopped on his final appearance, not his best look, since his mouth and eyes remained half opened, as if he would eternally fall asleep. His nose was dirty, too, but that’s not the first thing that Deirdre noticed. She hardly held back her shriek, and walked towards him. His forehead was way too cold, and she couldn’t find any pulse. It seemed to her that she heard the snow shovel scrapping the ground outside, which was very unlikely, which made her realize she’d have to announce the death of a child to people she didn’t know, people who had never been in her classroom with the kids, people who would just see that the death of a child happened under her surveillance. Now, it was clear, Bruno was gone, and everybody in the room was looking at him with curiosity, as if he was a new type of human being, looking slightly different because of his immobility, and also the apple-green mucus coming out of his nostrils.

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Deirdre had never subbed in an elementary school before, but she needed money. The divorce had been hard on her. Two years had passed, and she was still not financially stable. Every gig was good to get, every few dollars per hour, which was essentially how she had been paid all her life. Contingent labor. You’re free, but you’re also free to find a decent health coverage deal and figure out how many hours you need to work to put food on your table. That’s maybe what she regretted the most in her husband’s departure: his good health insurance, and the regular salary that would come even in the summer, when school is out. When he left to go with the bowling lady, he took his privileges with him, and suddenly, Deirdre couldn’t afford a cleaning at her regular dentist. She had to go to a clinic in the north of the city, but once on the dental chair, she ran away because the place was dirty and depressing. This was Deirdre’s wake-up call. Something had to change, or end, in this situation. She didn’t know exactly what, which was fine. Sometimes, you don’t get all the answers all at once. The only certain thing was the necessity to make more dough.

The two-week replacement she found was a good deal: well paid, and it would take her out of the city at the time she hated the most: the end of the year. With a little luck, when she would come back from the gig, she would tell her family that she got the flu, or something worse, and she couldn’t travel and get the risk of getting the elderly ones sick. She was too freshly divorced to confront them, especially her sister showing the new-born of the year and her mother faking kindness until boozy eggnogs made her comeback to her true self. They would judge her harshly for being alone at her age. Her cousin Cristina would take her out to smoke a cig, and whisper to maybe think of changing her first name, or to at least have a nickname for dating apps. Next year, everything would be different. She would bring somebody to her tribe, as certain as her ex-husband was dating a blonde bitch with horse teeth.

The elementary school was on Lincoln Island, an island!, five hours away by car from her. This was a private school, with only one class gathering second and third graders. The person who recruited her said it might be very cold, but Deirdre had spent her entire life in the Midwest. She knew.

At the beginning of the adventure, she was thrilled. The ferry – a ferry!- made her feel free and empowered and she frenetically took notes of all her new ideas on her phone app. But the way Bruno’s dead hand felt against her warm skin put back this happy memory in the most remote place of her brain. She didn’t know what would happen next. She had to say something to the children, patiently waiting, their seven pairs of eyes riveted on her back. She turned to look at them and tried to imagine they were not really them, simply very realistic dolls. It worked. You don’t look completely human when somebody else, a grown-up, decides on your hairstyle. They had read the story of the old badger a few days ago, so she started to talk about this, avoiding brutal words that would traumatize them forever, but Melissa erupted. “Bruno is dead!”

No shit, Sherlock, she almost replied. Instead, she grabbed her phone and called the principal.

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Deirdre wasn’t expecting to be seduced by a small town. A little heart now appeared on her Google Maps, showing her location right in the middle of the second largest of the Great Lakes. This truly made her feel far away from the civilization, maybe even more than the rare colorful houses she spotted during her walks. It wasn’t too exotic, people had the same trucks and jeeps she saw in her big city. The change of scene happened because of small things, like the Swedish restaurant sandwiched between a gift shop - closed until May - and a dive bar.

George Washington Elementary School was far from the center, but close to where she lived. Her employer housed her in a fully equipped cabin. There was a wooden church next door. Yes, a curiosity, a souvenir of old times in Europe that she loved to look at while sipping on her large matcha latte prepared in the comfort of her new house. Not too gloomy for a Sunday, she thought, looking at the snow falling like powder sugar on the church dragonhead gargoyle. These flakes looked so lazy, floating like these, taking their time to land on a surface and melt. It snowed differently where she came from.

When Deidre bit into her cookie, she felt something hard under her teeth, like a little stone. She spit the culprit into her palm, and went to check herself in the mirror. The edge of one of her front teeth was sharper.

She started her work at the George Washington Elementary School the next day. The young students seemed interested in her, and listened carefully to her instructions before completing their assignments. They seemed a little shy, but who’s not their first time meeting someone? Plus, living in isolation like this was certainly challenging for these kids, and it would get even worse when they’d become teens, young adults… What did their parents think?

She sent her teaching report thirty minutes after the end of her first day. She got a notification saying the principal had “liked” her email. Deirdre had decided to not contact the teacher she was replacing because she supposed she was sick or had something complicated enough that prevented her from going to work. Plus, her lesson plans were clear and very thorough, and she had no questions to ask. Everything was good, except, she felt a little lonely. When she locked her classroom door, crossed the empty hall and stopped on the school threshold, she realized she hadn’t seen any other adult.

The thrill of having a new job gradually faded, revealing the mundane problems of teaching. Links in the lesson plans were broken, the cable to connect her laptop disappeared – she could swear it was here yesterday! – and one kid showed up late, which weirdly upset her. She looked through the window to see if the person who had dropped her student was still here, but she saw no one.

She decided to take the kids to church. Elisa, Bruno, Jacob, Sherry, Rocio, Cameron, Shelly and Melissa, they all bundled up before walking to the wooden edifice. She had them sit on the pews and pray. She sat, but while they bent their head and closed their eyes, she looked at the wooden wall and the holy paintings with curiosity. The place smelled like the lodge in a pricy resort where her ex took her every vacation they had in common.

The little problems she had with technology irritated her more than usual because there was nobody on site to help. It stressed her out to rely only on herself. Also, she wondered what the kids thought of her. Because the lesson plan was unclear, it took her ten minutes to access the audio for the Spanish lesson. Maybe the kids thought she was a failure.

One morning, because he was lying on his side, she thought the classroom rabbit had died. Luckily, his little nose was still twitching. But he looked too thin, and his brown fur was sparse. She wished she had somebody to contact, in case something happened during her class, rabbit-wise or not. During her break, she tried the phone number included in the principal’s signature email, sent to welcome her to Lincoln Island. She left a voicemail. She then sent an email to the administrative assistant person – the same one that gave her the schedule - and she replied right away, which reassured Deirdre. She printed the list of emergency contacts she’d given her, and when she returned to her laptop, her mailbox said INBOX (1). It was the admin girl again, telling her she would get paid at the end of the week, and asking her if she could sub a little longer, until the Christmas break. She ended her missive saying parents were raving about her, and the principal would meet with her before the holidays to offer her a regular position starting in the middle of next year. Deirdre felt like she could fly over the lake, to come back home, and announce to her mom, her sister, and her ex-husband that her time was finally happening.

The next day, the weather got much colder. She struggled to open her classroom door, maybe because she was carrying a big box of donuts to share with her class. She had to put it on the floor, and take out her gloves. Inside, somebody was waiting for her. Bruno, sitting at his usual place. Deirdre screamed, “What have you done?”. That’s the very first thing that came out of her mouth, but what she really meant was “What are you doing here?”. The kid had visibly spent the night here. The door was locked from the outside, and she was the only one to have the keys.

Bruno put down the comic book he was reading, visibly annoyed to come back to this reality. He shrugged.

How did that happen? How did she manage to lock him inside the classroom? Was it because she was distracted after the full-time job offer? Has she done that on purpose, because it was easier to stay stuck in her misery than to face a bright future? And this damned kid, what did he do? Why didn’t he call someone? Deirdre wiped her anxious tears when Melissa showed up. Don’t show the beast you’re hurt. Also, there was a tiny chance she could still have a normal day after that. Bruno didn’t seem traumatized, or even cold. He had added wood to the stove, and she noticed that he had given his green mittens to the rabbit who was comfortably installed on them.

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An entire week passed. Deirdre and the eight students made oatmeal raisin cookies, researched where animals live, and studied the history around their church. Then, Bruno died.

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Désiré,

It’s me again. I’ll try an email since you won’t answer the phone.

I’m aware we’re not supposed to talk. I know. Restraining order. Something weird is happening to me. I’m subbing on Lincoln Island, in an elementary school, and they’re super cool, they even offered me a full-time position, except a kid died in my class, this morning, yes, he died and I feel like I’m going insane.

It looked like a seizure at first, but he also had something disgusting coming out of basically everything single hole on his face, nose, mouth, ears, eyes, everything, and it stunk very bad. So I’m wearing a mask now, and I gave some to the kids, too, but they’re too large for them and they keep falling so we’re going to give up on that.

I moved his body outside of the classroom and called the principal. They sent somebody, a man. He talked through the door, he gave me instructions. I told the kids it was a seizure, like his brain had stopped working, and I didn’t mention a virus or anything. I took them outside, and thank God it is not too cold because we ate on the school’s stairs. I feel so bad. I had them eat their little sandwiches in the cold, but I’m so afraid to catch something serious. They have their whole life ahead of them, and I’m sure their parents have good insurance. I can’t afford to go to the hospital right now, my life will get better with the full-time they’re offering me, but in the meantime, I have to clench my teeth and protect myself. I had an email from the principal shortly after it happened. There was nothing in Bruno’s medical file, so they basically don’t know what happened. He told me I wouldn’t be in trouble, and that I should just go on with the instruction. I’ll do it. Plus, the children are not traumatized – what do they understand at that age? – and I even think that it brought us closer to each other. Melissa, one of them, came to give me a hug a few minutes ago. I’m happy to move on. I just wonder if it’s right. I’m so angry at the principal for abandoning me in this. Plus, he’s supposed to be the principal of a school but there were a lot of spelling errors in his email. My sister thinks I should come back but I don’t really have anything that makes me want to come back. I’m not attacking you, Désiré! But you know me, better than I do myself, so what should I do? Do you think it’s okay if I stay? Please answer me, and don’t tell your lawyer I contacted you.

Hi to your beautiful Betsy,

Didi

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Deirdre gradually calmed down, in part because she didn’t get sick. Taking the class rabbit to her cabin seemed to be a good idea. It helped her reduce her stress. She took care of him, cleaned his fur with a damp cloth and fed him well. She even let him roam on the floor. At school, even if everything looked good, she never felt at peace again. She was afraid another kid would drop dead. Maybe the kid had an infection. Maybe it was in the food. Maybe he showed signs that Deirdre ignored.

She wasn’t really a substitute anymore since she had to design more lesson plans. That put pressure on her and made her doubt. She wondered if she was explaining things correctly. When she saw kids chatting, she got worried they didn’t think the class was interesting, or even that she was weird. She grew terrified of Melissa. She was a tween, a judgy one. When Elisa brought a little brother to the class, William, she didn’t say hi. He was here to show his wobbling tooth. Little Bill was in pain, and he was crying a lot. Deirdre decided she would give a little help to his body to get rid of baby stuff. Deirdre used her fingers as a pair of dental pliers but the blood that kept coming out from the hole at the root of the tooth made it very slippery. Swallow, she said, and the kid obeyed. She put her free hand on the kid’s shoulder and pulled. When the tooth came out, everybody cheered. Except Melissa, too busy doing doodles inside the class textbook – Gosh, Meli, that is forbidden! Maybe she was jealous of Elisa.

Deirdre never got any answer from Désiré. Which was okay. Caressing the rabbit while watching black and white movies in her little cabin in the woods calmed her down. For now. She also took long walks to record sounds for her new project. She would call the track “Bruno”. She had noticed the little music of the waves hitting parked rental boats, abrupt like dagger stabs. The thin ice cracking happening at different moments and places on the frozen lake also created a melody invariably followed by the woosh of the foam bubbles. She wouldn’t have to work too much on it, it already sounded like a dirge.

While wandering in nature, she kept thinking about her students, without wanting it. These kids behaved so well it made her suspicious. They regularly raised their hand to answer her questions and there was always one volunteer to help her clean the classroom, even after two weeks together. She didn’t have a lot of experience with kids, but she was sure of one thing: they didn’t react like normal ones.

Luckily, she didn’t feel too traumatized by the passing of Bruno. He quickly became the dead kid, who had passed during her class, a story she would later tell people – but not a shrink, because she couldn’t afford therapy. Going to see Jesus didn’t cost a thing, so she spent long hours in church. For the first time, she felt the need to pray, and speak to her Creator, who replied, Keep faith, Didi. Soon, you’ll have good health insurance. Even when they were not having a conversation, she spent long hours in Stavkirke, “stave church” in Norwegian, built after an 1150 model. Outside, she admired the steeple that the volunteers had helped to build, and inside, she knocked on the thick pillars, put her ear against the walls to see if she could hear anything. Even the walls were made of paper, there was nothing to hear. She was in the middle of a forest. Everything was silent in this wooden tomb. At dusk, on her way back home, she saw a man with a red winter coat and a hunter hat. She waved at him. He didn’t reply. Seeing him made her go out to the dive bar. She vaguely flirted with a gentleman in a polo shirt named Dan. He asked her if she was the one taking care of Karine’s students. He gave her his number. They stood outside the bar to look at the sky. She had never seen so many stars in her life. A myriad of little white dots, milky stains on a dark tablecloth, with a vaguely artistic shape. Within her mind blurred by all the beers she’d had, she wanted to see a meaning in this constellation. A sign, the necessary little push she needed to go on with her life. She got nothing from the sky, but got Dan’s hand on her waist. She let him do it, and press once, then twice, before pushing him back. She didn’t dare to look at him, but she didn’t have to be a genius to know he felt offended. After she took the last puff of her cigarette, he said: “This bad habit will kill you, if nothing else comes before.”

Deirdre started her Monday in a terrible mood, certainly feeling that this new week would bring a new death, and a resurrection. She was worried. The administrative girl hadn’t responded to her emails asking about the next steps. She didn’t know if she would sign a contract, or when she would start. She would need to relocate, so she obviously needed guidance. She hadn’t contacted the principal, not yet.

One night, she couldn’t sleep because she didn’t know what would happen with her life. Maybe they had given her a fake offer. She would never have this full-time. And this was the last time she would have a chance like that, because she was too old.

Everything seemed so strange.

Maybe too strange for a teaching life.

Maybe this wasn’t a normal school. Maybe she was inside an experiment. Maybe the kids had been instructed to manipulate her. Maybe this was all a joke, designed to see how long she would last, isolated like this.

The rabbit had stopped eating, so Deirdre brought her back to the classroom, thinking the company of the children would motivate him to stay alive a little longer. But before recess, Melissa, who was done with her exercises, went to pet her. Deirdre saw the tween raise her hand. She first thought that she wanted to share how the rabbit had put his head in her hand, because Melissa was blessed and only great and special things happened to her. Deirdre couldn’t really read her face, though. Was it pride? When her teacher told her to she announced to her classmates that Bunny was dead. She was right. Nobody seemed surprised, and Melissa, definitely more skilled as a peacemaker than her teacher, insisted on the normality of this death. It wasn’t like Bruno, who was so young, and who had something that went extremely wrong in his body. Bunny was old, he had a good run and was just too fed up to keep living.

Deirdre ended her class earlier, and saw the kids go to the back of the building where their parents would show up. She didn’t wait to see if they did. She never had, and she wouldn’t start today. She threw the dead rabbit into the recycling bin.

At home, she found an envelope full of cash in her backpack. It was the exact amount for a full week of teaching. She previously had a deposit from the school, last time. What did it mean? Were they done with her? She didn’t sleep that night. She thought of Melissa. She texted her sister to let her know about the cash, and how she thought something was orchestrated to drive her nuts. Sis responded with the offer to help her, and maybe pick her up on Friday night, after her work, to bring her back home. Deirdre declined.

She shivered when she passed her classroom door the next day. There were eight kids, all smiling, including Bruno, filling the seat that had stayed empty for a dozen days. She decided to say nothing, because she wouldn’t give these little monsters what they wanted. She assigned them hard exercises and she felt very happy when Melissa started to cry because the instructions were too complicated to understand.

During class, she kept glancing at Bruno. There was nothing to see. Just a kid. A big head on a tiny body. Dirty fingernails and eyes moving fast like hummingbirds. When he started to chat with Jacob, she came closer to them. She thought the two boys were speaking in a foreign language, something guttural and ancient. But she remembered that they had their codes, their world that she wasn’t a part of. Deirdre checked if Bruno had finished his exercises. He was struggling, like the others. She stayed next to him, her eyes inspecting his nostrils, his ears. Nothing. No foul smell either. She put her hand on his forehead. He didn’t seem surprised. Of course not. He knew she was freaking out, and deep inside him, he loved it.

Without the rabbit, Deirdre felt extremely alone. She also felt clear-sighted. This teaching gig was coming to an end, and it was better that way. The children got her. They felt her vulnerability and they had used it against her, with the complicity of the school and the parents. It was always the same story, right? The world loved to squeeze Didi, so fragile, so kind, to see what would come out of her, of all her pains, all her humiliations. It happened every time she dropped her guard. People were animals sucking on her wounds, always looking for more delicious blood. Her husband did it, turning her into her doormat that would accept to fuck girls just to let him do his dirty videos. Her sister asphyxiated her with a successful life, and her mother with lists of all the different ways Deirdre had disappointed her. She got bullied at school; she got bullied in life. Simple. Didi was a victim.

Deirdre gave herself another chance to act normal, just one more time. She doubled the number of pills she usually took, ate an entire bucket of ice cream and decided at 1 am to put a frozen family-size pizza in the oven. She took 3 more pills after her feast and fell asleep in her armchair. She dreamed of an arch made of stones, with its foundation buried deep in the snow. A cardinal went to stop on top of it, which woke her up, or maybe it was the pain in her stomach. It was almost time to go to school.

Melissa ran into her with a bouquet of flowers. They were red, because red was her teacher’s hair color, and also her own favorite color, the one from her Minnie pencil case. She giggled when her teacher asked her if she had visited another season to find such beautiful and scented roses, and Melissa replied “Only in a dream I had last night!” which seemed to satisfy Deirdre.

Deirdre decided to end this school day on a French lesson, to make these little motherfuckers suffer. She turned her back on them, and started to write vocabulary on the blackboard. Words the kids would not understand, like traitor, pain, or death penalty – traître, souffrance, peine de mort – that they would have to use to write sentences. She called out Bruno, and ordered him to go stand in the corner, facing the wall, for no reason at all.

She came back to her task on her board, but a loud fart stopped her. She turned her head, and behind her, the children were all looking at her. Rocio and her pouting lips, Sherry with her fat nose that would need a lot of surgery to be corrected, and Shelly and his front teeth coming out of her mouth. They looked so ugly this class looked like a freakshow. That’s right, freaks kept on an island to not scare people on the continent.

Somebody farted again, louder if possible, and this time, the children laughed. The disgusting sounds continued, as the class hilarity. It was Bruno. He was the only one not laughing. His cheeks were red, and he looked deeply sorry - but who knows if it wasn’t fake?

At this point, Deirdre knew what to do. She thought of her divorce, her job as “contingent labor” and this proliferation of gas that reminded her how sickening bodies were. She took the time to erase the French words on the board, cleaned her desk, and turned off her computer.

She told her students to stand two-by-two, and get out. They didn’t have to take their coats, winter hats or gloves. They didn’t need all of that where they were going. As she was saying that, she passed on a fur coat, the one she had bought in the prevision of her stay on Lincoln Island.

They walked to the church, and because it was too late, she had to use her key to open the door. She had the seven children and the resurrected demon enter, and she closed the heavy wooden door behind them. Locked it. Then, she went to her cabin to take the material stored in her attic. She came back to the church. The fire started strong with the paper. She brought some wood she used in her chimney, and soon, flames ran up the church’s wooden structure.

She heard bangs on the door and children weeping, and she left, coming back to her cabin. Deirdre thought of absolutely nothing, at peace, feeling exactly like the moment before she discovered Bruno had died in her class. She didn’t go inside, but got behind her little house, where the old well was. She touched its cold stones, sat on the edge, turned her legs in the direction of the pitch-black hole. She said, “Fire for them, water for me.” And then, she jumped.

Sophie Ann Hinkson relocated to Chicago from Paris a few years ago. In France, she worked as a bookseller and journalist for a literary magazine and radio station. She is now teaching ESL and French at various colleges in Chicago. She holds an MA in Modern Literature from France and is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at UC Riverside’s Low Residency Program. She lives in Chicago with her husband, one cat, and six pet rats.

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