FLASH NONFICTION
ALLISON A. DEFREESE
CONTRIBUTOR'S NOTES, THE SUB
She surfaced the last week of school for a few hours after lunch, and only once. I don’t know if she had a name. In the 1st grade, my age was still one digit, and she was old, though not brittle like the teachers who usually came out of retirement to scream at us when Miss Hicks was sick. The sub didn’t come with a plan (or perhaps she did), and brought out the crayons, played music, let us streak our harvest-yellow desktops with watercolor trails when we missed the paper while painting. Then she read to us. Words didn’t frighten her, nor did laughter, the books she brought were bright with pastel magic.
And school felt comfortable for once. And the afternoon passed in a dream.
We imagined she was our everyday teacher, the way we could dress our mothers up as Florence Nightingale, or Dolly Madison, or Dolly Parton, or Eleanor Roosevelt or someone else’s wife from a postage stamp, with Helen Keller and her doll as our imaginary child. The way you can stage your childhood in another era when you are a girl of six or seven, without considering the consequences of historical settings or race. We were at the end, and our grade school yearbooks had arrived. She signed mine with a poem; I had not seen many. It was about all the different ships sailing in the sea, and how a “friend ship” was the best; then penned “The Sub."
The yearbook is long lost now. It drowned a month later where I’d left it: on the back of a hay wagon that summer vacation. The pages locked together in one flat trunk again, turned back to tree bark by the rain, my classmates’ faces tearing and ripping in white on gray when I tried to open it, a whole school year of class signatures sworn in secrecy, irretrievable. Yet what remains in the flood of memory washing up thirty years later, are these lessons from her forward fin and scope:
Even if it is the first time, even if it is the one and only time, even if it doesn’t matter, because you are never coming back. Be who you are, be gentle, speak kindly and permit a bit of messiness. This is love.
And school felt comfortable for once. And the afternoon passed in a dream.
We imagined she was our everyday teacher, the way we could dress our mothers up as Florence Nightingale, or Dolly Madison, or Dolly Parton, or Eleanor Roosevelt or someone else’s wife from a postage stamp, with Helen Keller and her doll as our imaginary child. The way you can stage your childhood in another era when you are a girl of six or seven, without considering the consequences of historical settings or race. We were at the end, and our grade school yearbooks had arrived. She signed mine with a poem; I had not seen many. It was about all the different ships sailing in the sea, and how a “friend ship” was the best; then penned “The Sub."
The yearbook is long lost now. It drowned a month later where I’d left it: on the back of a hay wagon that summer vacation. The pages locked together in one flat trunk again, turned back to tree bark by the rain, my classmates’ faces tearing and ripping in white on gray when I tried to open it, a whole school year of class signatures sworn in secrecy, irretrievable. Yet what remains in the flood of memory washing up thirty years later, are these lessons from her forward fin and scope:
Even if it is the first time, even if it is the one and only time, even if it doesn’t matter, because you are never coming back. Be who you are, be gentle, speak kindly and permit a bit of messiness. This is love.
Based in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, Allison A. deFreese is a poet, literary translator, and 2022 National Endowment for the Arts fellow. Her work appears in Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, Harvard Review, Hunger Mountain, and more. Her poetry book Nurdles and Other Poems is forthcoming in September.