The portable classroom trailers huddled around the school like gray toadstools.
Makeshift wooden walkways led from the squat brick school to the “learning cottages,” as the administration insisted on calling them. The teachers just called them “portables” or “trailers.”
The trailers seemed to appear as quickly and quietly as fungus after a rain. As more and more children flooded the school, more and more portables covered the old blacktop basketball courts and hopscotch squares, their original recess purpose long forgotten. Gradually they had eaten up every inch of black asphalt surrounding Eastbrook Elementary.
One trailer stood apart from the others. It sat close to the edge of the school grounds, just a few feet from a chain link fence entangled with overgrown hedges. Mrs. Kratz taught fourth grade here. She knew they put her here because they wanted to get rid of her. Every year she moved further and further away from the school. Maybe next year I’ll just be teaching in the parking lot, Mrs. Kratz thought.
How she hated trudging up and down the creaking, ill-lit covered walkway to go to meetings or just to get a cup of coffee from the lounge. And her trailer was the worst trailer of all. Rust stains ran down the sides on the gray corrugated metal like old blood. The heating and air conditioning unit chugged and gasped.
Worst of all, the latticework that enclosed the crawlspace under the trailer was broken in several places. Animals could come and go under the trailer as they pleased. Rats, opossums, raccoons…Mrs. Kratz pictured an army of vermin under her feet. She could hear them scratching and rustling around, especially after school when she stayed late to do paperwork and prepare for the next day’s class.
Mrs. Kratz filed endless maintenance requests that seemed only to disappear down a black hole. She complained loudly and frequently to anyone within earshot whenever she came into the main building. The other teachers and staff began to edge away when they saw Mrs. Kratz in the lounge or the hall. Mr. Beltran, the chief of building services, was so skilled at avoiding Mrs. Kratz that she was unsure what he really looked like.
The children hated her cold, dingy trailer too, almost as much as they hated her. For she could definitely see the hate in their dull little eyes. “Fat Kratz” she heard them say, when they picked up their backpacks and scurried off at the end of the day. Just an idiotic, mean little rhyme – Mrs. Kratz was actually on the bony side – but she couldn’t laugh it off any more. Mrs. Kratz had not been able to laugh anything off for a long time.
No matter. She would endure it. She just had a little time to go until retirement. Only a little more time with these hateful children, unpleasant coworkers, hypercritical administration tyrants, endless testing…and her trailer. Her awful, awful trailer.
The scratching grew louder every day – these past few weeks Mrs. Katz could hear it even while she taught. One day she sat with her slower reading group, painfully listening to them mangle Laura Ingalls Wilder, when she heard scratching right under her feet.
“For…Laura…loved…” read Samantha slowly.
“Quiet,” interrupted Mrs. Kratz. “Do you hear that?” The four children looked at her blankly, then at each other. Scratch, scratch.“Well, don’t you?” she demanded.
“Uh…what?” asked Jaime. He looked at her with wide, confused eyes.
Mrs. Kratz grimaced. “Nothing. Go on, Samantha.”
Perhaps the cold October nights drove the animals under the trailer even more than usual. The school was going to have to hire wildlife trappers.
Why couldn’t the children hear them?
The end of the first quarter finally arrived, and with it, Halloween. Mrs. Kratz dreaded the holiday: the wild children, the humiliating costume parade, the chaotic party.
But as usual, she endured. She endured the cardboard playing card costume that the fourth grade team leader insisted she wear. She endured the parade around the playground in a chill wind. She endured the party itself – no parents would come, but they all sent the same package of supermarket cupcakes with orange frosting made from congealed vegetable shortening, the same sugar water in foil packets.
Mrs. Kratz had no games, no special party activities. She hid at her desk and played an ancient cassette of Halloween songs while the children gorged on sweets and screamed at each other. The scratching from beneath the trailer grew louder and louder, no matter how much Mrs. Kratz turned up the volume on the old boombox, no matter how loudly the children yelled.
Finally the day ended and Mrs. Kratz was left in peace. As she swept up black cupcake crumbs and orange napkins, she noticed that the scratching noise from the crawlspace had finally stopped. Now perhaps she could finish her work.
The sun had set and Mrs. Kratz was halfway through her grading when the noise started again. Scratch, scratch, scratch, followed by a loud knocking and rustling.
Outrage reddened her face. This was not an animal. This was just a Halloween trick. She should have expected this. The children at Eastbrook were well on the way to becoming street gang members as the neighborhood degenerated. This was exactly the kind of prank the little monsters might pull on “fat Kratz.”
She wouldn’t stand it. She wouldn’t stand any of it any more.
Mrs. Kratz marched to the trailer door and flung it open. “Now you listen to me, you – ” she began as she stepped out onto the dark walkway.
She never finished her sentence.
An unpleasant sensation, like fainting, came over Mrs. Kratz. She felt as if someone pulled a blanket over her face. Sudden pain exploded in her head. She tried to scream but it came out muffled. Then everything went black.
Mrs. Kratz awoke to find herself pinned in a small space, in complete darkness. Cold mud underneath her back. Something hard above her.
For a terrified moment she listened. Above her, voices. Then footsteps.
She had to get their attention. She tried to call out, but no sound could leave her throat. So she scratched tentatively on the surface above her.
No response.
Of course they wouldn’t help her, Mrs. Kratz thought, filled with fury. Of course. They would just pretend they didn’t hear her, just like always. She scratched harder and harder and harder until her nails split and her fingertips bled and her bones cracked.
Still she scratched.
She didn’t care. She would keep it up until they heard her.
****
“So if you have 36 apples, and you give some to Richard…” Miss Morris paused and turned away from the Promethean board. “Did…you hear that scratching sound? Just beneath?”
The kids looked at each other, bored. “Hear what?” asked one of them.
Miss Morris shook her head and smiled. “Nothing. Probably just an animal from the woods.” A rat, she thought.
She would definitely have to fill in a maintenance request.
THE END
© Stephanie Harshman Diaz