Bryce Ingmire
Rightfully, they were proud of their art. Proud, but not smug —smugness comes later with adulthood. For now, they glanced sheepishly in the direction of their work, nodding in the affirmative when asked by an adult if such and such drawing or painting or origami bird was theirs. Feet crossed, one big toe boring holes in the floor, children wriggled in place, hands and arms twisting, entwined behind them. “Yes,” they respond, but only when prompted by their mothers to remember their good manners.
Adrift in halls, their parents appeared lost. They had the look of ambulatory fish: hunched over, sometimes awkwardly flopping, chasing their evolved, leggier spawn. And when they saw the other parents they knew, a jolt of recognition streaked across their face, marooned sailors eyeing the empty ocean’s horizon for a boat and finally spying one. And they would stop to talk, interrupted by the neediness of their spawn, wiggling on and watching in impatience.
The school’s only art teacher wandered, too, catching up with colleagues who, to their credit, came out after hours to support the children and the program. Occasionally, he found himself trapped by a student who, excited to see their art teacher outside the context of the classroom, ran toward him with open arms. And he talked to the student’s parents, introducing himself—he thinks, though he can’t remember if he had—and talked glowingly of the student and of their gift for art, whether they were gifted or not. And when the conversation died because neither party had an interest in keeping it alive, they politely parted ways, and he ambled elsewhere to repeat the conversation he had just, a minute prior, left satisfyingly open ended.
The teachers who stayed past three or returned to attend the show visited with the parents they weren’t afraid of, before hiding in their classrooms to finish work they’d left for later. Some of the teachers had been volunteered by the principal for the art committee, the loosely assembled group assigned to assist the art teacher in organizing this event and others like it. Some ran the ticket booth and organized the raffle, the proceeds of which were collected and fed back into the art program’s coffers, which had been shrinking. For now, the program still had life, but the very real danger of the art teacher’s termination hung above his head like a guillotine, held by a fraying strand of unreliable parental support. Imagining it, he was always under a razor’s shadow.
The principal, a woman in her forties who cared little for art (or for school events) dallied in the halls just long enough for her presence to be noted by the right people. She had a date she didn’t care to cancel and slipped out the cafeteria door when no one was looking.
The janitor hid in the maintenance room, reading the sports section, snacking from a bag of chips he bought from the staff vending machine. His radio was on, humming away, low and garbled under a layer of static. In a few hours, after everyone had left, he’d roll out his waste bin and move door to door, room to room, collecting trash before trading the trash for a vacuum. Then on to the bathrooms and miscellaneous tasks.
Later, when his rounds had been made and the doors were all locked, he left, and mice scurried out into the dark halls. They scampered in the walls, navigating the pitch-black labyrinth of studs and sheetrock to the cafeteria kitchen, where they knew they would find something to feed on. They found their way into classrooms where children, ever messier than cooks, left snacks in their cubbies, little bags of Goldfish to be found the next day marred by rodent-sized teeth marks, holes bitten in corners.
The janitor never left out traps. He had always liked mice.
And later, later than even the hour of the mouse, the ghosts came out. They inhabited the old school, that part that had existed decades before additions and costly remodels. They floated from class to class, door to door, called in and out of rooms by the shrill ring of a long absent bell. In the dark one cannot see them, but if one could, there they’d be, behind the desks, forever listening to the ramblings of their beloved English teacher. Twenty-three ghostly students, trapped in the rhythms of school, in a pattern of repetition only broken by the bell. And when it rang (a ring only they could hear) they shuffled out, floating but still shuffling, opening lockers, slamming them shut, slipping ever so gently into the dark.
When light finally trickled in at sunrise, the last of the ghosts hid, somewhere in the ether of the school’s past, and the children of the present day arrived to assume the rightful place time had allotted them.
Several pieces of art that had been carefully taped for display were torn down in the night or, in the absence of a ghostly presence, had fallen. The students who cared or were keen to help, picked each precious piece up from the floor and attempted to hang them again, though the double-sided tape had lost its adhesive. They’d turn and walk away, to class or to the playground, believing to have done something good, and when they were gone, the pictures, as if bearing awareness and kinship with the floor, fell again.
After school, the janitor walked the halls with his waste bin, tossing in pictures that had fallen, papers that had been forgotten, snack bags that had been abandoned, and detritus of dirt, lint, and whatever else the broom ensnared.
The art teacher gently pulled work from the walls and organized it by grade, class, and student, to be handed back to the artists. From time to time, he stopped to admire a work, often by a child too young to draw anything figurative well, and placed it in a separate pile of abstract works to display in his room.
He’d hold on to these works, even long after he was let go and the program cut. He’d search back, thumbing through each painted picture remembering when the job seemed so hard, but the students, so full of life.
And the Janitor sat in a recliner at home, long after he’d retired, eating the same brand of chips he’d eaten alone in the privacy of the maintenance room, and he’d feed the pet mice he kept in his living room, white fur purer than their reputations.
And the children would grow. They’d leave and become parents like their own, and flop down halls chasing after their amphibious, land-traipsing children.
And some of the teachers would still be there.
And so would the ghosts, though one hopes those spirits might sooner break free and move on somewhere unknown but better.
And the principal would be gone—long gone after realizing she didn’t care.
And perhaps, after death, the art teacher who had long ago given up teaching would return and take up residence among the pale shapes haunting the dark. Perhaps he’d teach again and in death trace the same ghostly repetitions he traced in life.
Bryce Ingmire is a music teacher. He steals time to write as often as he can. “The Art Show” is his first published work. He lives in Dallas, Texas but dreams of the mountains.