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

intoned. “Much too hot for humans to survive. They would burn up instantly.” The astronaut disappeared into the yellow circle of the sun as a man’s screams faded into silence on the soundtrack. One of the students whimpered. On the way back to Morningcroft, Eril threatened not to let the troublemakers, the mammary gland boys, the whimpering girl, the incessantly chatty Donald, back on the bus. “I’m going to leave you here,” she said. “Let’s see how you like that.” It was a clumsy threat, Eril knew as she made it. The kids knew she didn’t mean it, and this just confirmed what they’d suspected for a week: Ms. Larcom was not a very good teacher.
    At the staff meeting that afternoon Eril asked about curriculum, about lesson plans, about discipline, about what was and was not appropriate for third graders, about all the things she was only just realizing she knew absolutely nothing about. Besides the principal and secretary there were four other teachers, refugees who had come to Morningcroft Montessori in search of a place to exercise their frustrated talents, their curricula reflecting the different directions they wished their lives had taken. One decorated bulletin boards with her own hand-painted borders, spent two weeks every January on watercolor reproductions of famous paintings, the originals taped to the students’ desks so they could be confronted with their own inadequacy. Another recycled the vocabulary of modern dance into stress-relieving activities, physical fitness initiatives. The fifth-grade teacher had filled her classroom with all the musical instruments she could afford, meaning mostly bongos and plastic xylophones. She had written a version of the Code of Hammurabi set to bongo accompaniment for a unit on Justice Through the Ages. “ An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, ” she sang, drumming her hands on the table. “The kids love it.”
    They asked Eril what drove her, what she loved, what she could twist into thematic units that met MEA standards for the third-grade year. But Eril was a woman without great talents, forced to pride herself on small, unexpected skills, like the way
she could untangle knots, hold her breath for two and a half minutes, or the way she’d taught herself in the sixth grade to balance things on her head the way women did in third-world countries or finishing schools. She still practiced sometimes, unloading groceries from the car and balancing a twelve-pack of diet soda on the top of her head, plastic bags in each hand.
    That Friday, the end of her first week, Eril commenced teaching grammar. It was something she knew. The four types of conditionals, starting with the Zero. The conditional tense for certitude, a state of inevitability: If you heat water to 100 degrees Celsius, it boils, Eril wrote, then crossed it out. If students misbehave, they are punished, she wrote in larger letters. The chalk squeaked as she made the final d and the children complained. Eril rapped her knuckles on the board. “Five examples in your notebooks. Go.”
    She walked around the room and looked over their shoulders. If you go to the sun, you die. If astronauts go to a star, they scream and burn up. Donald had two sentences so far: If climate change happens, species go extinct, and If people are mean to someone, they will be sorry.
    â€œThat’s the first conditional,” Eril said. “We haven’t learned that yet.”
    â€œThey are sorry,” Donald corrected.
    â€œIt’s grammatically correct. But it’s not really true. They aren’t usually sorry at all, are they?”
    Donald erased his sentence.
    Morningcroft was not a real Montessori school. Morningcroft was not, as far as Eril could tell, a real anything apart from some last-ditch effort to avoid Ypsilanti public schools. For parents who couldn’t afford other private schools or charters and didn’t bother looking