The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell Read Online Free Page A

her students the year before had had childhood-onset OCD and had needed a complicated cocktail of pills just to get through the day without panicking over pencil shavings on the floor—but it was really between the parents and their doctor, and more and more chose sedation over the risk of a playground injury leading to exposure with every year that passed. Someday, she was sure, her classes would no longer care about recess; they would be medicated into calm acceptance of their place indoors, and the blacktops would lie empty and unneeded until they were torn up to build new, secure classrooms.
    That day wasn’t here yet. The bell rang again, signaling that the halls were empty, and Miss Oldenburg opened the door.
    *  *  *
    The recess system used by Evergreen Elementary, and by other schools in the district, was revolutionary for its time, and even now, eight years after the 2036 incident, experts have been unable to find any fault with the design. The issue, it can be argued, was not with the system itself, but with the simple fact that no system, however idealized, can be expected to behave with perfect predictability once a human element has been introduced. In short, the issue was not with the school itself, nor with any of the checkpoints installed to prevent incidents such as the one which unfolded on that chilly March morning. The issue was, and will always be, with us.
    Elaine Oldenburg led her students down the empty hall to the rear door leading to their quarter of the blacktop. A security official was waiting there with a blood testing station. As each student tested clean, they entered an airlock, waiting there until the entire class, and their teacher, had been cleared. Only then did the airlock open. The school playground had been divided into four sections, each containing a portion of blacktop, a portion of lawn, and a play structure. These sections were sterilized throughout the day, with a ten-minute break between recess sessions, and plans in place for closing individual sections as needed in the case of greater contamination. Walls separated them. Only sound could travel from one section to another.
    The sound of laughter. The sound of screams.
    â€”from Unspoken Tragedies of the American School System by Alaric Kwong, March 19, 2044
    *  *  *
    Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 10:05 a.m.
    Seventeen first graders poured out of the back door of Evergreen Elementary and onto the playground. They had been assigned the coveted leftmost section for this week’s recess, with one wall that actually bordered on the forest. The forest! The big, dark forest, full of mysteries and monsters! Half the class ran to claim space for kickball on the grass nearest the wall, where they could feel brave and clever for standing so close to the forbidden outside world. The other half took refuge on the play structure at the center of the blacktop, some of them grabbing red balls from the available basket, others swarming up the monkey bars with the ease of long practice.
    It was still a little chilly, and Elaine smiled and wrapped her arms around herself as she watched her charges storm the battlements of childhood, their shrieks and laughter drifting back to her like the sweetest music ever composed. They would learn to be afraid soon enough, she knew; she had done substitute playground duty for third and fourth graders when her name came up in the rotation, had watched their sea of dismayed faces as they jockeyed for spots on the blacktop nearest the school doors, where they could flee back to safety at a moment’s notice. Fear really crept in during the summer between first and second grade, she felt; that was when the world became too big and loud to be overlooked, when the fact that it could touch you became unavoidable. This was their last truly carefree time, and she was blessed to be one of its custodians.
    It was a little harder to hang on to that feeling of being blessed when things