The school gives us boys clip-on ties to wear. They dig a red mark into my neck. I hate Catholic school and big fat Miss Marion, too. She makes us pray, then say the pledge of allegiance. Everything about her is so mean. Today is special, she says, Because the new holy cards are here. She passes them out. Mine has a picture of Jesus with hair to his shoulders and a scrappy beard. Lines of light stick like blades from his skull as if he’s got a bad headache. A bunch of kids have gathered around him. Maybe that’s why his head hurts. Jesus has his hand in the air, like it’s moving away from his mouth to pull more words out, or hold something, maybe an old piece of fruit, maybe Eve’s dirty apple, maybe both her apples, soft and evil, so he can go to hell too. Even so young, I know of things like Eve. I have a pen with a lady on it. You hold it one way and her clothes peel off. Flip it back and she is dressed. Sometimes there is nothing to do but think of Miss Marion and wonder how she would look if all the buttons of her white shirt popped and the zipper of her skirt burst apart, and everything suddenly opened and dropped. Probably, naked, she’d be a lot less mean. I flip my holy card over. On the back it says the Ten Commandments For Children. Love your schoolmates is number one. I look at Jeffery. Just yesterday, he socked me in the shoulder for no reason. I’ll never love him, no matter what. Then Miss Marion announces it’s time for a bathroom break. Because I sit in the back, I am last to go, and for a couple seconds, I have the room to myself. I look at the new holy cards, sitting on the empty desks. I move fast. I grab them all, ripping them as I shove them in my pocket. Then I wait in the hall with rest of the class. Miss Marion is there, hands on her hips, big wrinkly boobers hiding under her monster bra. Double chin. Her giant crushing butt makes an umbrella out of her skirt. If it rained and you went under there for shelter, you would surely die from the poison gas that bleeds from her butt. When it’s my turn in the boy’s room, I empty my pockets. I drop the precious cards right in the urinal. They float in everyone else’s unflushed pee. Then I pull out my dinger and spray them good. This is the beginning of all sorts of trouble. It doesn’t take long for Miss Marion to come slamming down on me. She grabs my shoulder, yanks me into the hall, and yells my full name for everyone to hear. You are a heretic! She hollers, It’s a blasphemy! You hear me, a blasphemy! Get out of my sight! Get out! Now, I am going to Hell. That’s for sure. But first, I need to go sit in the principal’s office. He doesn’t understand what might be wrong with me. He calls my mother at work and makes her come get me. I slump in the chair as he tells her about the consequences of suspension but then decides it’s better to simply kick me out of school forever. He even asks for my tie back. I pull it from my collar and drop it on his desk, then stand there between them, holding my fingers to the welt on my neck.
Steve Hughes is the writer and publisher of Detroit’s longest-running zine Stupor. He is also the author of two collections, Stupor: A Treasury of True Stories (Stupor House, 2011), funded by the Kresge Foundation, and STIFF (Wayne State University Press, 2018). In 2011, he began producing the potluck/literary series called The Good Tyme Writers Buffet. Hughes lives in Hamtramck Michi- gan and continues to collect stories at local watering holes for forth-coming issues of Stupor.
