Assistant Editor Maggie Su: This wicked-sharp dreamscape begins with our tween-boy narrator and his father being chased through a middle school by a bear. Yet, like a funhouse mirror, Jones’s initial premise shifts as the story progresses. The opening absurdity is used to reveal the senselessness of school shootings. Jones writes, “Geometry is useful! But its volume of 1,024 square feet is useless to protect us.”
To hear Julie read her story, click below:
Well Done, Middle School Administrators
A huge brown bear escapes my dream and chases my father and me through Felix Frankfurter Middle School. Saliva sloshes from the tips of her fangs as she convinces us of her threat level: Code Grizzly. We leap through The Rectangle, a red steel-beam sculpture set in the quad to provide students with real-world application of scholastic abstractions. Geometry is useful! But its volume of 1,024 square feet is useless to protect us. It welcomes within its teachable moment she-bear, tween-boy, and fat-dad all. His wattle sways with each stride. If not for the parent-teacher conference, he wouldn’t be here, his bear-sized heart hurtling over our campus. And then it happens. Beneath his bulk his ankle torques, and he is down.
Is this my dream or my father’s? I now have magnetic power. I stretch it out in search of a gun. I find one in a girl’s backpack and zap it into my hand. It is loaded. I don’t care how it passed undetected through security or that the girl and I are in the same homeroom or that she got a D on yesterday’s pop quiz on parliamentary governments or that her mother is freaked that her chances for admission to Harvard Law have now diminished by three-tenths of 1 percent or that mother-freak is highly contagious to cubs. Her gun is in my hand. From last month’s Active Shooter training, I gleaned how to disengage a safety. Was that the intended educational outcome? In any case, I am firing it at the bear as she charges my father. She charges and my mind solves for death. Though I’ve been taught no physics, in a split second I calculate velocity, distance, trajectory. I fire and fire and fire and my arms are heavy with recoil but down she will not go.
Is this my father’s dream or the bear’s? The bullets, my screams; nothing bars her onslaught. With each footfall, her glossy fur shifts over muscle and recoils. Is she a mother freaked? Her gaping mouth is a cave within which my father and I will slumber. Does our terror tenderize our meat for her maw? Why, in school, do they teach us nothing useful?
Julie Jones holds an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work is forthcoming in the Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review and Aquifer: The Florida Review Online.
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