flashquake Fiction

Just Aiming to Pass
by Beverly Carol Lucey

Maddie squeezes her bulky square body into the last desk in the last row. She sets her brown canvas satchel down beside her. The writing surface in front of her is gouged from thirty years of insolence and boredom at the hands of the hostile day students. Pen clips, protractors, and jackknives have left hacked shapes to tell people how dull it all was when they sat here.

Usually Maddie gets to night class early enough to sit at one of the few tables where she can spread out. She likes to arrange her notebooks and highlighters, her pens and White-out. Nothing is more important than looking like a good student. It's the least she can do. From the very first night she hoped the teacher would notice how seriously Maddie is taking this opportunity.

She scratches a couple of chigger bites on her fleshy upper arm, mostly to distract herself from the flutter worries. If she doesn't pass this last test, she can't get the certificate. If she doesn't get the certificate, she can't keep her job. All because of the regulations. They changed. They won't let her be provisional any more.

They say she is now unqualified in her nursing, after she's already been working for ten years. Not counting helping eight family folk and five neighbor ladies in their dying days before that.

Special Home Health Aide. Only now the new governor puts his nose in things so her agency has to hire Associates, not Aides. Meaning high school graduates. Meaning Maddie has to go to school and hope this time she learns something. Or at least passes the tests. It's the tests that cause the clenching.

She sees people writing on their hands. Is that an all right thing to do? Her plump hands are scrubbed clean. No specks under the nails. One ripped cuticle. No information is inked on her palms. She hears others reviewing state capitals. The capital of Utah is....what now?

Dell drove her over in their 1972 Pontiac. It's so rusted out she always has to lift her feet when she sees Dell heading for a puddle. She was distracted tonight, so her rubber soled shoes make squishing noises because they are soaked.

Maddie itches, listens to the younger ones talk, feels the desk push at her belly as she reaches for her Ziploc bag of No. 2 pencils. Teacher stressed that. Only No. 2 pencils could register, otherwise the test wouldn't count. Maddie remembers this, but can't think of anything else the teacher said the last eight weeks.

None of the words swirling around her make sense. As if the students aren't speaking English. Except they are. They must be. Everyone speaks English in this class. But Teacher speaks English different from most of the people she knows. He's from somewhere else.

Teacher comes in carrying a box. He passes tests out, goes up and down the rows. Plops booklets down on desks and says encouraging things. When he looks at Maddie he pats her, but doesn't say anything.

Maddie writes her name on the booklet just before the teacher says not to. Her face is burning. The whole class does the first question out loud because it is a sample one.

The Mona Lisa is:

1. Henry Hudson's boat
2. a famous painting
3. a palace in Spain
4. a Mexican mountain

Now see? Maddie thinks Mona Lisa might be the only known legitimate daughter of Elvis Presley. Otherwise she doesn't know. She can't remember learning it.

The others get to work. Some unfold pieces of paper onto their laps. Was she supposed to bring notes to use? No one told her she could use a sheet of paper for hints. She only brought her brain and right now it is empty.

Long minutes go by as Maddie stares at the blurring bubble sheet. The letters won't behave.

Maddie puts her pencils back into the zip bag. She inhales to get out of the desk. She gets her stuff together trying so hard to get out before teacher looks up from his paperback book. She tries to be light on her heavy feet as she toes out the door.

Her satchel weighs her down on one side, so it looks as though she is veering to the right, all the way down the corridor.

In the darkened hallway Maddie listens to her shoes squish, and worries Miss Margaret won't take to the new girl the agency will have to send over, fussy like she is, and so close to the end.

Outside, Maddie sits on a huge block of granite beside the stone stairs. The cold, damp leftovers from the rain seep into her behind, but it feels wet at such a distance from where her heart beats, that it makes no sense to move.

She will wait the two hours for Dell to come fetch her. It doesn't matter.

Copyright 2002 by Beverly Carol Lucey

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