Fira's Gift

Fira misses her leisurely coffee, her studio where the resin piques not only her nostrils but reveries and illuminations. However, one canvas won’t pay for the car insurance due end of month. She tells herself everything will go smoothly. Ms. B’s lesson plan looks straightforward. Fractions, spelling, and sustained, silent reading. The school day concludes with a Jell-O brain demo. Imperial commands to a substitute teacher aren’t out of the ordinary. See staffroom fridge. Middle rack! Inedible, NB! But the next directive is counter to everything she learned in teachers’ college. Do not let them touch it! Children learn through play. What better opportunity for shaping young brains than jiggling a replica brain? Poking! Prodding! Is Ms. B a schoolmarm? Bespectacled, hair bun in tulle as she toils? Stirring a boiling cauldron?​
​Fira shivers and a breath of cloud escapes. Her first visit to a rural school. Frozen pastures under a crystalline sky. The odd, red-roofed barn. She makes out the two-lane highway despite the spatters from the snowplough ahead but the wiper’s thunk-thunking––out of sync with its partner on the passenger side––smears the windshield with each malfunctioning swipe, and although she can outsmart Waze across town, for once she obeys the navigation app.
​The receptionist says they mustn’t go out at recess. Frostbite warning. At least the desks aren’t in rows from the 1900s. The walls on the other hand are plastered with faded educational posters. Twenty-eight fourth graders tumble and collide into warm air. Rosy-cheeked boys and girls, they hang their chilled outerwear and shuffle towards desks grouped four apiece. Fira beams. She remembers one prof’s jest. Smiling any sooner than January ensures pandemonium. She taps a finger to her lips and waits before she recounts the icy parking lot, Ms. B’s fractured wrist.
​“Aw,” says one boy at centre front.
​​“Is she coming back Monday?” The girl’s tone is hopeful. Earnest faces confirm Ms. B’s strong hand inspires worship, but then doesn’t a dictator?
​Lips mouth words during SSR; sunlight drapes the lowered heads closest to the windows. The occasional page flutters and turns. She herself was a reluctant reader, words no match for illustrations in which she lost the sense of time; her comprehension tests always scored low.
​​Ms. B’s learners are moulded to the regimen but when she re-enters the classroom after lunch, a dishtowel draping the Jell-O just as the homeroom teacher directed, the light is changing, clouds low and laden with the snow predicted during afternoon rush hour, and the interior too portends a maelstrom. Howling like wolves, two boys. She switches the pair to opposite corners. They glare. A pair of cubs. They don’t yet realize their claws will draw blood when they hunt real prey.
​​A girl blocks her ears. Fira flicks the lights off, on. Off, on. Sweeps her hair into a loose bun. Opens the teacher’s desk drawer and flourishes coffee stirrers before whipping off the covering like a magician. Scarlet jelly inside plastic lime green elicits oohs and ahs. She adheres to Ms. B’s decree and demonstrates the polar regions. Feeling. Thinking.
“Who can show––use your stirrers, please… Where does the brain make decisions?”
“This is boring!”
“Science is about experimenting. How about we mix in some art?”
“You’re not the art teacher.”
“Actually––”
“My dad says Ms. Amber was fired.”
“The music teacher doesn’t work here anymore.”
Droplets of condensation streak the windowpanes. The fields that mere months ago would’ve erupted tall and green and golden now stretch flattened, incandescent as, say, an art gallery’s walls of white. She closes her eyes and superimposes framed paintings and black music notations as if she’s making a vision board for the laid-off pair. Creative works to come, she trusts.
They are looking at her. Glazed uniformity. Dull and incurious. Someone at the back yawns. The heavy clouds, the fuggy air. Somnolence threatens. It weighs down her eyelids too. Should she let everyone rest their heads on desks? Before her, the Jell-O glistens. A slimy sheen. She strides to the windows and unlatches one clasp. Crystals dance into her nostrils as gusts barrel inside. “Why don’t we do some sketching until the school bell?”
One girl grazes the tattoo on Fira’s inner wrist as she circulates and distributes drawing paper. Another asks about her kohl-rimmed eyes while the third compliments her long pink streaks. Says she has nice teeth. Does she get veneers? Her mom does.​
​​“Not any old drawing. I want you to imagine whose brain this is, and yes, living or someone from the past. Human? Yes, Amina, we know by the shape. A face, Willow, will do perfectly. The whole body? Go for it, Riley!” She knows how to stoke the fires of creativity. As with flames, kindling is fundamental. “Let’s see. How is this brain feeling? Are they afraid? Play with it!”
Chairs scrape. They swarm the teacher’s desk. How could she forget how literal children are! One unthinking remark and the tallest boy, the ringleader, hoists the mould. The two wolves square off. Combatants join in. The tug-of-war loosens the Jell-O. The hippocampus tumbles first and then the executive function sheers off, splatters the floor by her feet.
“Who wants to eat brains?” The ringleader shouts.
“Yuck! Yuck!”
“Ew!”
Sweat pools in Fira’s armpits. She was trained never to shout. How else can she make herself heard? “We’ve a word for someone who won’t eat––”
“Shut up, Jason!”
Keep your cool. Breathe.
“Let her speak!”
A wolf breaks off mid-howl.
“I’m a vegetarian,” Fira offers.
“His farm has cows.”
“We’ve goats. And llamas.”
“My mom keeps horses.”
Horses? A stalk of chalk cradles the blackboard shelf. Clip-clop, clip-clop. Flying hooves. Clip-clop, clip-clop. Fira erases the morning’s work. “Does she? Where does the gelatin in Jell-O come from?” She taps her foot and points to the teacher’s desk. The ringleader drags out every step but replaces the hollowed Jello there. “Animals. Bones. Muscles. Skin. Anything springy like…” She unties her hair and holds up the elastic band. Snaps it. And winces. Amina winces too. “Some believe Jell-O’s made from the hooves of horses, but they contain keratin.”
She sketches wildly. Consults her phone and draws arrows to her mare’s gaskin. Hock, cannon. Fetlock on the rear leg. Elbow, forearm, knee, flexor. Tendons, pastern, hoof. The class is hushed. The diagram, she figures, counts as the science demo even if it deviates from Ms. B’s plan. She indicates and recites each body part and is facing the blackboard when she senses movement.
A girl in pigtails is running for the door. “It’s alive! Breathing!”
Fira bars the exit. “True likeness is impossible but thank you, Jessie. I need you here, first in line. Those at the front desks, come join her.” When the lineup is complete, she herds the children down the corridor. “Giddy up!”
The ringleader whoops. Fira signals for everyone to stamp their feet in time with the chant. “Clip-clop, clip-clop!” They neigh. They are whinnying horses. Trotting, cantering. And panting hard when they return.
“Cover your mouth and blow. Is your palm wet?” Fira too breathes hard as she explains how water vapour clumps in the cold air and makes minuscule icicles. “Deep breaths! Hold three seconds. On three, press on your tummy, open your mouth. Push, push. Where’s your breath cloud?” She exhales, inhales. Wispy vapour wafts from nostrils and lips. “Leila, fill this jug with water, please.” She assigns one cub to distribute pencils and crayons, the other the paint tubs and brushes while she reappoints herself by her horse. “In, out. Breathe it to life.”
“That’s weird!”
“Crazy!”
Snowflakes are drifting and swirling. Never knowing where the crystals next spin or settle gives Fira the same feeling whenever she paints. Airiness. Serenity. “Into life it breathes. Giddy up! Warm inside the barn?… If you like. In the fields, fine.” She waits for fingers to clasp paintbrushes, the paint colours to soak paper, the water to colour. She anticipates the alchemy between observation and hands-on magic.
“I can’t draw.”
As if by contagion, a chorus chimes in and no one dares to lift an artist’s tools. Fira knows better than to contradict the children for they’ll surely compare each other’s depictions and perceive some better than theirs.
“I see.” She regards her mare. Not a bad likeness. “She’s unique. Will she want anyone to copy her?” The chalkboard eraser rubs and rubs until the flowing mane, the gentle eyes, the long lashes, disappear. The arrows and labels merely hint at the rearing creature from before. “See this empty space? Make it yours… in outer space?” Fira blows the dust from her palms. “The battlefield? Sure. Wherever! With wings? Why not?”
The stillness grows, the focus too. The time between breath clouds lengthens and primes dreaminess. A silent space. Respiration, inspiration.
When the bell shrieks, the children discard their artwork and stampede for the coat hooks while she strolls, scrutinizes the pieces one by one, assesses the light versus the dark tones, the fanciful against the lifelike. Come Monday, Ms. B will confront the children’s work. What will the schoolmarm make of it? What will the class say? She wasn’t like the other teachers. The classroom was freezing. Will someone complain? How will she defend herself? Spout the edu-speak of her professors? Facilitating? Modelling?
She helps one straggler shrug into his sleeves. He doesn’t look at Fira. He trots down the corridor with his backpack bobbing like a tail. Swish, swish. She removes the fusty posters and tacks every single picture to the wall. The sequence makes sense to her eye. The windowpanes are spattered with snowflakes and they skew and filter the light; her gallery of horses swirls. Vibrant. Alive. Every creation she loves as her own. Creatures of chance. Corralled by breath!
She dumps the remnants of Jell-O in the corner bin and nudges the door open to its widest hinge. In the parking lot the snow is deep as her shins and she tests each step for ice below. The wind pummels and stings. A real blizzard. A whiteout. Her car, the last one remaining, is frigid. She blasts the heater and defogger and takes the brush to the windows, snow fluffing like clouds. She claps her boots together, slides onto the seat, still glacial, before her gloved hand wipes an opaque spot at eye level. Her stare stays unfocused.
She’ll likely never see the grade fours again. Unforeseeable which paths they’ll follow. Nevertheless, she projects them into summertime under jaunty streamers, balloons. Long legged, some wear makeup, others sport beards, every single one a doting parent. They dole out Jell-O slivers. Neon orange. Slimy lime, cherry red. Snowy ice cream. She wonders if they’ll ever revisit today. A warming sensation spreads in her chest. She won’t forget. Cantering down the corridor. Hooves midair. Seconds later she bounds outside and bows her head almost tenderly into the wind.
The janitor is mopping the corridor several doors down from Ms. B’s classroom and she asks if they wouldn’t mind keeping everything in the classroom the same until Monday and, after the shy nod of assent, Fira picks up the chalk box and contemplates the pastels before sketching puffy white clouds. Balloons soaring above a long picnic table. A Mediterranean pastoral. Dollops of gelato over pretty pink Jell-O. The onlooker is wide-eyed and, except for the blackboard’s patches over the flexor and fetlock, chalky white, her horse. In the top right-hand corner she prints her favourite quotation. “Life is short, the art is long. Hippocrates.” The Greek’s wise words from centuries ago.
She’s cleaning her hands at the corner sink when a bucket clangs.
“Bueno, time cleaning.” The janitor doesn’t enter but scans the teacher’s desk, the smudges from the chalkboard eraser, the blobs of sticky Jell-O. “Ms. B… like… clean.” She advances as if the floor will contaminate her running shoes. In her mid-forties or early fifties, the woman doesn’t glance at Fira’s artwork. Nor the children’s. A zealous cleaner. Does she fear Ms. B’s reprimands?
Fira indicates the blackboard. “Memento?” She can’t leave without trying to save the horse. She tells herself that a passing glance by even one child on the Monday would be reward enough but she knows she’s fooling herself. She’s aiming for a lasting impact. The brains of every boy and girl forever altered. She wants them to remember her and her lesson. Horses, yes, that only they could create––which Ms. B may allow each child to bring home––but also how she modelled the making of art. Out of nothing. With her own two hands.
The janitor frowns.
“Souvenir?” Fira fixes her palms in prayer. “No clean today. Ms. B say.”
“Ms. B say you?”
Fira beams and signals a thumbs up before she approaches the blackboard for one last look.