An Hour in the Heart of the Country.
8:37 am.
A kid, a boy, maybe 7 or 8, is taking a piss out on the edge of the fields, where the woods start, behind the elementary school. It’s recess and all the other kids are making a racket a hundred yards in his rear. There’s screaming and laughing and high voices calling out names but it’s all one thing: like a big fire: as if so much energy is marauding at once that it’s not possible to separate the good from the bad. The noise is unstoppable and likely untouchable. It has no equal in this world.
It’s a cool bluebird day in March and the sun is a lemon leaking on the kid’s hair. He aims his healthy stream at a penny-sized moth trapped in a spider web. The moth makes attempts to free itself but nothing changes. It is losing, worn out; everything it does is useless. The kid zips up and leans in to the trapped creature at the precise moment that a lady teacher on patrol spots him and starts hollering his name, warning him to come back.
“You don’t look so hot,” he whispers at the insect.
There is no spider present. The boy ponders the coming moment. He could set the moth free. He could crush it to death. He could leave it to suffer, smirking like a Hollywood villain. Or he could leave it unchanged, so the spider has lunch when he finally returns.
The teacher calls his name again and this time her voice is nearby. She is coming. She is closing in. He turns to her and squints. She’s maybe 25, a newbie, like a lot of the teachers out here in the sticks.
“There’s a moth in a spider web,” he tells her as she approaches him “I think he’s in trouble.”
Her silver flat shoes are soaked with dew; the grass has been growing but the janitors haven’t mowed. She is annoyed.
“Dakota, why in the world are you all the way over here and not responding to me calling you?”
He looks at her more intently.
“I had an emergency,” he mutters.
She looks around, tries to figure things out.
“Did you urinate out here?” she asks.
The kid doesn’t answer. He hangs his head and starts trudging back into the symphony on the blacktop. She turns her face towards the parking lot, her new used Subaru, its rolling thunderstorm green sparkling in this late morning light. Sighing now, she looks at the moth the boy had been watching and she sees that it is dying. It is wet with dew. As she turns back towards the school, she senses a glowing ember rising down within her. Her lips move in silent prayer for the prisoner. Another sigh, her feet soaking wet, this day is young and takes forever.