ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

The School
by Kristen Iskandrian

BEATING


It was a privilege. I was privileged. To stand in the courtyard and clap, furiously, the two gray bricks together. Others sneezed, coughed; I clapped harder, accepting the dust on clothes and hair, enjoying how uniformly it enveloped me, how instantaneously it aged whatever it settled on. In the window was an old woman clapping erasers. I understood her not as reflection, but projection. We stopped moving our arms together and instead pushed them outward, beating the erasers against the stone wall between us, inches from the glass that separated us from our most riotous impulses. Without rain, there would be markings, white rectangles whose crosshatch would announce the violence that had happened there.

“The most common method of cleaning erasers is to beat two of them together until most, or at least a portion, of the chalk dust they hold is loosened and leaves them. The person who cleans them by [this method] will feel grimy and dirty, and his throat may become dry from breathing the chalk dust, and his eyes may smart if wind blows the dust in his face.” Charles Everand Reeves and Harry Stanley Ganders, School Building Management: The Operation and Care of School Plants (New York, 1928), p. 217.

“It required 40.6 seconds per eraser to clean them by beating them together.” Charles Everand Reeves and Harry Stanley Ganders, School Building Management: The Operation and Care of School Plants (New York, 1928), p. 218.

“Backs are bent or broken; felt strips are separated. They erasers no longer do a good job, nor can they be properly cleaned. There comes a time when erasers, like old shoes, should be thrown away.” Henry H. Linn et al, The School Custodian’s Housekeeping Handbook (New York, 1948), p. 141.