Blackboard Jitters

By T. R. Healy

After she got off the bus, Mallory turned and waved to the driver who smiled back as he pulled out into traffic. Sometimes, if it wasn’t raining out, she got off a couple of stops early so she could walk to the Lebanese restaurant where she worked as a hostess four days a week. She needed the exercise, especially after she stopped doing yoga because of some soreness in her back.

“How’s everything?” the owner of a floral shop asked as she approached his front door.

“Fine, thanks.”

“You think we’ll squeeze in another day in paradise?” he wondered, looking across the river at some threatening clouds headed in their direction.

]“I don’t know.”

He grinned. “More likely another day in purgatory.”

Smiling, she continued on, adjusting the strap of her purse. At the corner she noticed across the street, propped against the side of a bench, a blackboard with a fluttering sheet of paper attached to it that said in large black letters “FREE.” The board was huge, almost the length of one of the front windows in the restaurant, and so clean and smooth it scarcely looked as if it had been used. She hesitated before she crossed the street, taken back a little by its presence. She hadn’t seen a blackboard in years, assumed they were pretty much obsolete with laptops and cell phone and all the other devices people communicated with these days.

In another moment, the walk sign flashed on and half a dozen people started across the street but she remained on the corner. She felt something with an edge pulse in her stomach, a sensation she hadn’t felt since she was in grade school. Though it was many years ago when she was a student, she almost felt as if she were one again. So clearly could she remember all the times she was summoned to the front of the class to diagram a sentence on the blackboard.

Almost at once, others in the classroom would snicker and smile because they knew how difficult it was for her to diagram even the simplest sentence. She particularly had trouble diagramming word modifiers which had to be placed in diagonal lines under the words they modified. Sometimes so many lines were scrawled across the board, all going in different directions, her head began to ache she became so confused.

“It looks like a couple of chickens sprinted across the blackboard,” a teacher remarked once which caused her classmates to burst into laughter.

Tentatively she crossed the street the next time the signal turned green. There was only one other person in the crosswalk, an elderly man with a cane, and she just hoped she maintained her balance and didn’t have to ask him for support. Right below the blackboard was a shoebox with an eraser inside and a few broken sticks of chalk. Anxiously she averted her eyes, refusing to look at the board, and hurried to work. Already her head was starting to ache and when she got to the restaurant she asked one of the servers for an aspirin. The blackboard reminded her of school which she detested. Time and again, her mother assured her that one day she would look forward to going to school but that day never came. The only thing she looked forward to was not having to go there anymore.

***

The next day the board was still there with the “FREE” sign still fluttering in the breeze. She was not surprised because she could not imagine who would want the ancient thing. Someone had drawn a smiley face in the center that was the size of a pumpkin but it made her cringe not smile. As she strode toward it, she was almost tempted to kick it over.

“Damn it to hell,” she muttered to herself.

She could not count all the times she was required to stay after school for being disruptive in class and, as a punishment, often had to write something like “I shall pay attention in class” a hundred times on the blackboard.

Her fourth grade teacher, Mr. Greenlick, frequently made her stay after school, even when she had no idea what she did wrong but she never complained because then he might make her stay even more often. Occasionally, after she finished, he would dig his tobacco-stained thumbs into her shoulders and massage her muscles which he assumed were sore from all the writing she did. A few times, when it was very warm in the room, he would invite her to sit on his lap and offer her a cup of apple cider and ask questions about what she liked to do when she wasn’t at school which made her very uncomfortable. He was easily the creepiest person she ever met at school or anywhere else and for years had managed to keep from thinking about him until yesterday when she saw the blackboard.

Damn him, she thought to herself as she stepped past it. Goddamn him.

 T.R. Healy was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, and his stories have appeared in such publications as Commuter Lit, Fictional Cafe, Hawaii Review, and Welter.