The Chalk Beast
Memoirs of a Governor's School Morning in my Junior Year

She’s such a bitch. She moves across her green slate background like a snake with broken, non-existent legs, moving through the grass. What I mean to say is that in all her chubby-toed awkwardness, she maintains a certain adroitness, and seems to be keeping something from the rest of us. Her movement is not unlike a little maggot, or other arthropod, clumsily burrowing, but with much greater ease than any other creature could claim or understand. That’s the key word- understand. No one could comprehend any utterance that escaped the old maggot’s lips. The chalk she wrote with seemed to hold an interdependent and rather desperate relationship with everything about her. Her cheeks were painted with it, her hair was decidedly made of it, and her general appearance seemed the eternally aged bastard offspring between it and an old, sad milk cow. At first it was almost painful for one to hate such a pitiful sight, but all at once when she turned you into a muttering fool under the blanket of her chalky, hazy reality- you got over it.

Once the scene has ended, and I have learned all of the nothing that I shouldn’t have, she removes her huge blue jellyfish eyes away from the crowd and looks down at the table, dismissing us- conceding defeat as her glasses meet the hard, black stuff. Every time I leave the room, the same epiphany strikes me down. My senses all seem to kind of get a cold chill and jump into existence. When I breath in the same air every day that sometimes tastes like paper, and I leave behind the haze and the battlefield, it makes me at once alive, depressed, and excited. Just after I exit the door, and take a step and come alive, for a split-second as I morbidly look back at the corpse (people feel compelled to do so), I’m thrown back into the room and forced to remember that awful wall across the passive-aggressive chalk beast. It strikes me best as a geometrically inverted reflection of her. The wall is painted in colors that have a dire need to be vibrant, but are hushed by the milky thing facing them, an eternal conflict and mockery between the two.

Then I return and notice the trees. I always say hello to or greet at least one person between the here and there, and sometimes walk with someone at my side. But I am always alone, and so is the other person. All the things around me are just waking up, and I notice things in this journey more than at any other time of day. I usually don’t notice the important things, but I notice the real things. One stretch across the landscape is very green, that’s the most noticeable thing, because no traveler coming or going is excused from avoiding the giant depression in it, and instead must walk along a little trail carved out toward whatever their destiny might be. Mine was a content and aging man whose best friend was Charles Darwin.