Read Online This Is Not Your City by Caitlin Horrocks - Free Book Online

bark and the jagged brown dust of dried leaves, sea shells that smelled like the residue of the animals they’d harbored, damp and rotting and salty. It was a great wreckage of life.
    Steckelberg left and Eril walked across the room to the table. The portable felt suspended over some uncertain, hollow space. Once she heard the principal’s car pull away, wheels spinning in the unplowed lot, she jumped up and down. The floor quivered. Eril was not used to feeling so large. She looked at the walls, the alphabet in cursive, the American flag, a series of Your State Symbol posters: the official fish of the state of Michigan was apparently the Brook Trout, the official mineral the Petoskey stone. The official state game animal was the White-Tailed Deer, for which, she read, the hunting season was divided into periods for Archery, Regular and Late Firearm, and Muzzle-loading. She wondered if her eight-year-olds would know these things. She wondered what she was supposed to teach them. For a moment she wanted to cry.
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    Monday morning she stood and watched the children arrive, stripping off their coats and boots in a pile near the door. The children stared at her suspiciously and read her name, Ms. Larcom, on the blackboard along with the date and a Word of the Day: fortitude. A boy lifted the rat out of its cage and cradled it in his hands, letting the long, hairless tail dangle in the air like a tentacle. “Binx’s tumors have gotten bigger,” he announced, and set the rat on a blond girl’s head. The girl screamed and the week went downhill from there.

    Thursday was a field trip, already arranged by the departed biologist. There was no money to charter a bus, so Eril had been left instructions to walk the children to the corner and catch the 16B Ypsilanti/Ann Arbor to the Natural History Museum. The docent delivered the museum rules while standing next to a transparent plastic woman with light-up organs. Bored, the children pressed the buttons to light her pancreas, large intestine, esophagus. Then the boys figured out what the mammary glands were, and the woman lit up like a strobe light, like a showgirl, until the bulb in her left breast went out with a loud snap. A hot, burning smell lingered.
    â€œThey’re very immature,” a voice commented, down by Eril’s waist. She looked down at Donald’s brown hair, so light it looked dusty, like he was either prematurely old or extremely dirty. He’d worn a sweatshirt with dinosaurs on it to mark the occasion. He’d said it like that, “to mark the occasion.”
    â€œMaybe you should tell them to stop.”
    â€œThey’ll get bored in a minute.”
    â€œYou’re the teacher. You should tell them to stop.”
    â€œYou should mind your own business.”
    â€œYou’re not a very good teacher, are you?”
    â€œMaybe you’re not a very good student.”
    â€œThat’s not true,” Donald said. “I’m an excellent student.”
    Of Eril’s twenty students, she’d decided she liked Donald the least. He’d held her hand on the bus, refusing to notice the way the other kids mocked him, and lectured her on how Archaeopteryx was the first prehistoric bird with both scales and feathers, and how during the Ice Age Mastodons had once walked here, right here, along the 16B bus route. It seemed to Eril that there was something very wrong with him.
    The docent walked them past the plastic woman to the Hall of Dinosaurs and paused by a duck-billed Parasaurolophus skull. “Are you signed up for the planetarium show?” she asked Eril.
    â€œSure,” Eril said. “The planetarium sounds good.”
    â€œThey might be a little young.”
    â€œFor the planetarium? They’ll be okay.”

    During the show a cartoon astronaut, white and puffy like the Michelin Man, floated across the starry ceiling. “The surface of the sun is very hot,” the narrator