Parent-Teacher Meeting

scene

Josef kicked his heel against the tiled classroom floor. His teacher, Mrs. Mueller, held a piece of paper for his parents to see. She held the paper in one hand and pointed at it with the other.

“I’ll read it again. It says the teacher, quote. . .
‘with her thickening waist and gruel-thin hair
was a five-star midwife to his gnawing despair.’”

Josef’s parents glanced at each other. This didn’t seem great. At the same time, they didn’t want to take the teacher’s side immediately. Few people freely took Mrs. Mueller’s side.

“But it’s a poem, right?” Josef’s father said, very nearly smiling. “So she’s probably a fictional teacher.”

As he said this, Josef’s father made a gesture like smoothing and supporting an invisible orb. Joseph assumed this orb represented his poem.

Josef’s father looked at Josef’s mother, nodding at his own suggestion.

Mrs. Mueller shook her head and flipped the paper around to read,

“She had one blue tooth, alone and forlorn.
A single kernel of decorative corn.”

She then peeled her top lip up, nearly exposing her gums, and among the standard white ivories pointed to just such a tooth.

Josef’s father tilted his head in consideration and moved his hands away from the orb into a kind of shrug. Josef imagined the now unsupported orb falling to the floor and shattering.

“Let’s hear the end,” said Mrs. Mueller.

"'A small paper packet, containing a curse
The boy placed inside the mistress’s purse.
Though her family might grow ever so large
It ensured none would lack a befouling discharge.'

Everyone in the room meditated on the verses. After a while Josef’s father began nodding again.

Josef’s mother frowned and said, “So the boy curses the teacher’s family with a what?”

“A DIS-CHARGE.” Mrs. Mueller thumped both syllables of the word. “Where would he get that?”

Josef looked down at the invisible pieces of the orb on the tiles and then up at the teacher.

“From the Bible,” he said.

His father brightened. “It’s a Bible curse,” Josef’s father said.

“From David in Scripture,” Josef said. He realized that the tiles on the classroom floor were the same kind as at the grocery store, except dirtier.

“And David, as we know, wrote the Psalms,” said Josef’s father, left hand cupped and raised as though offering this fact as a gift to the teacher.

“A DIS-CHARGE,” Mrs. Mueller thumped again.