It didn't start with Mr. Clement, but it was his fault. It started five days prior, when Joseph's mother gave birth to his younger sister.

(They lowered her little body into the ground during what Lucia had always thought was the grandest season of the year. Only it wasn't a body in Lucia's mind; the second they closed the casket up and re-seated the splayed tumble of wild grasses and black-eyed susans atop it the little body became a tiny skeleton crafted of air-filled bones, just like a bird's. Just like the birds that she had read about last year, book after book inhaled, the scientific fact within them subsuming the fairy tales about flight within her.)

It had been two days.

(Before, the time when the baby girl's bones had floated into the ground was always called Autumn. After, Lucia couldn't see fit to refer to it as anything but The Fall.)

Lucia wondered.  A place inside her stayed aggravated with the wondering, all of it. But the biggest part of the wondering came wriggling up out of her before she could discipline it,  calling it back to herself sharply. It surfaced and by then it was too late, because Lucia called out Mr. Clement's name.

"When will Joseph be back, sir?

(two days, two days he had been gone, one day before the two he was staring dumbly at the dirt, holding his mother's hand, those hands that had clenched themselves into the shape of her breaking heart when they told her two days before even then that her tiny slip of a girlbaby, oh five days ago when a mother began both greeting and grieving that little new thing, but he had only been absent for the two days since the funeral)

 "Do you know when he's coming back to school?"

The classroom --already quiet-- went stone silent. That was it, then: They had all been wondering (well, almost all of them) too and their wondering had somehow taken up with her wondering, which was on its own substantial enough. All of it together had just become too heavy for Lucia to carry by herself, so she'd asked.

(that was it then; she had struck the trailhead and they had tumbled onto the newly-placed path just behind her, keeping up, questions of their own. timid at first, and then gathering and bunching in the closest approximation of an adult conversation that the twenty-three eleven-year-olds could knit together. Stacey Gibbons was the one that issued the question that had the distant ring of a deathnell behind it. Lucia had always liked him, she knew he would grow up to be somebody Important one day.)

"Where does a baby's soul go to, Mr. Clement?"

(Somebody said that because the baby had never heard the words of Jesus it might be a heathen and we all know where heathens go,
somebody said shut up Rooster that ain't funny,
somebody said that babies can hear from their momma's bellies, only it's like hearing it from deep underwater and everthing sounds like magic then,
somebody said well then I guess that little baby girl is in heaven bouncing on God's Knee right now because she's heard the words of Jesus while her momma sat there on the end of a pew every Wednesday and twice on Sundays, I saw her there in that church my own self.)

Truth be told, Lucia had never particularly liked the girl that had said the God's Knee thing until the very second the last word of that fine statement fell off her lips. Lucia's heart swelled in a way she'd never known before.

It swelled further with the gentle presentation of the assignment that Mr. Clement had then given them: An essay on what happens in the afterlife, or was there an afterlife at all?

("Afterlife" was a world that had never before existed for Lucia outside of religious texts, she hadn't yet thought to it hold inside herself and turn it over to suss out the texture of its curves.)

Her father was furious in his stoic German way. He was an athiest and though he'd never interfered with any sort of explorations of faith to date, he was not cheerleading his wife's efforts to Train Lucia Up In The Way She Should Go. It is not appropriate for a schoolteacher to engage in such subjects, he said, those whose lessons should be the responsibility of a family.

Her mother exhibited a first, too, openly and confidently petitioning her husband's blessing but not intending to squash the assignment if he wouldn't bestow it on her to give to Lucia.

Isn't it what you want, she asked pointedly in her Cuban-tinged English, for people to consider God intellectually? He could not stand firm against this clever turn from his beloved.

(Lucia flushed with excitement. She flew to the side of her bed, freshly-scrubbed face made solemn by the task ahead of her. She prayed openly to the God she had never second-guessed, the benevolent creator who had never once failed her, the same He who had sat alongside her then-infant self's cradle long after her parents had retired to their bed, new-baby exhausted.)

For five nights she asked God to give her dreams of Heaven, imploring him with frankness to show her every minute detail that he could possibly impose on her open and ready mind. It occurred to her on the sixth night that maybe what she needed to do was to stop asking God and just lie down, confident in the fact that she'd be ushered up to the gates the very minute her body let her mind loose enough to go do some wandering.

So Lucia didn't pray the sixth night, absolutely sure that God had heard her on those other five and was just waiting for her to shut up and ready herself for an experience the likes of which she'd never known. Then she woke up the seventh morning in tears, because in the one solid week since she'd been given the assignment she had slumbered thickly and without even the tiniest of murmurs about a dream, much less one about the Afterlife. God had denied her, and had done so without explanation.

She wept without wailing, not wanting to explain her sorrow.

(jesus, too, wept. on occasion.)

On that Wednesday morning Lucia wore a new face only she could see.

   

Mr. Clement,

  I'm going to have to take a zero on this paper. I'm very sorry to have failed at this assignment.

  My mother has always said to me that you can do anything you want to with the spaces between twenty-six letters. I won't waste them telling you a bunch of made-up stuff, though. The only place I know for sure that baby is is in her mother's heart.

Sincerely,
                    Lucia H.

Comments

[mongoliangirl]

So well done, Jett.
"...for people to consider God intellectually..."
You've made that happen.

[Susan (Trout Towers)]

Please submit this somewhere.

[TwoBusy]

After I finished reading this, I had to step back and take a few deep breaths. So very, very much to absorb and think about.

[sweetsalty kate]

I've read this three times. It's just lovely. It's uncanny, with what's going on in my head right now. Can I borrow it? Can I show it to some people who might like it and need it? I'll DM you.

[ms picket to you]

Kinda speechless. Standing with Trout: give this to the world. So rich with detail and so fully done..

[Cheryl]

Thank you for the link, Susan. I don't know how I missed this one.

Truly exquisite piece, Jett. It needs to be in print.