At My Elementary School on the Air Force Base

by Emily Hall

An eggy stink slithered through the windows every morning. It came from the marsh that swaddled the base’s airstrip. It stank up the cafeteria where we drank milk from floppy plastic bags instead of cartons and it infiltrated our fifth-grade classroom where Mr. Patowski would make his voice gentle before he took roll.

Deep into Fall, he had to give us index cards because we still hadn’t learned each other’s names. When he handed me mine, I taped it dutifully to the left-hand corner of my desk and its serrated edges bit into the one beside me, but it didn’t matt er because the kid who sat there the week before was now living in Alabama or Germany or Guam.

We had already forgotten his name.

Others our age might have met this with grief or frustration, but if military kids understood anything it was flux. In band classes, we blew into rented instruments. At recess, we played past each other in a threadbare field. Only later would I realize how strange it was that our school never bothered to take class photos. It was as if they knew that when the flash sett led they’d find us out of focus, our little bodies blurred into vapor because we never stopped moving.

Emily Hall (she/her) has a PhD in contemporary Anglophone fiction from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her prose has appeared, or is forthcoming, in places such as The Portland Review, Cherry Tree, 100 Word Story, and Necessary Fiction. She lives in North Carolina with her husband and their two pets.