HISTORY
Jonathan Callahan
Not the lynchings, nor the first indigo dawn behind a nuclear-gnarled skyscape, nor the self-anointed tyrant’s decree that a third of his sudden subjects be cast into the purgative flames; not the chanting blood-faced demons carving the figures of virgins preserved for future delectation, nor the war-sparrows’ song, shrill and sweet in the mornings they were loosed to pluck insurgent captives’ eyes, not the bonepile ziggurats over which waves of withered vagrants—the history teacher’s own forebears among them—scuttled and picked with frail fingers, nor the winedark river from which these ancestors drank, having no other water, the unspeakable hunger, its unspeakable antidote, the wastelands’ desolate chill, the deep caverns’ crushing heat; not the frenzied rituals of the elect, dancing round the new ruler’s throne, not the improbable culmination of a generation-spanning war in frail survival, peace, gradual restoration of the oldest order (though now under this sunless sky)—
No:
What the teacher sees just before he kicks the chair from beneath his tip-toed feet (his eyes closed against the dim lamplight that might spare him this last pathetic vision), is the flimsy little student he has often seen: surreptitiously shouldered, laughed at, shoved into the hall-tunnels’ crumbly walls, last-picked for burrow-ball, alone at mess, presumptive author of a host of lugubrious poetic lines left in palimpsestic evidence beneath the scrawl of a rather poorly-written paper on the Fathers of the Underground Revival;
the child’s small blue eyes peer into his, in the moment after classmates append to the jeering appellation they’ve already been forbidden to apply a few new, loudly-whispered threats of innovative violence, while he, the teacher, empty at the end of another afternoon of unheeded disquisition on the world of light and wind that once was, long ago, overwhelmed, again, by the brute stupidity of his scoffing charges, these hardened tiny monsters to whom he’s supposed to be passing on the flame, pretends simply not to hear, the boy’s eyes a plea from which he silently looks away.