Jessica Klimesh
Spelling Bee
Forty seventh graders (maybe more) line up against the bland cafeteria wall, lockers on the other side, and spell words like future, deficiency, and metamorphosis. Just like generations of seventh graders before them. Amid the fluorescent lighting of the junior high cafeteria, the forty seventh graders (maybe more) seek out (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) the letters for inconvenience or grammar. For sincerity, democracy, or boundary.
The cafeteria ladies always serve the alphabet for lunch, just like generations of cafeteria ladies before them, with slices of bread to soak up the letters that fall off the seventh (and eighth) graders’ forks. But by the time of the seventh-grade spelling bee, mid-afternoon, the cafeteria ladies are gone for the day, all bits of the alphabet out of sight. The students search for letters anyway, on each other’s shoes, out the windows, and on the neutral but encouraging faces of the teachers. They check to see if any letters have been left behind under the tables, but the janitors never miss a spot.
Tension runs high when there are only four seventh graders left, the others, defeated, now sitting bored at the cafeteria tables.
One by one, three of the last four spellers miss these words: misspell, ominous, and irony. The seventh grader that’s left spells tenacity correctly. Tomorrow (or next week), the others will find the letters for the words they missed, along with the letters for the words regret and expectations. And when one of the cafeteria ladies dies of a heart attack in a month, the news spreading via insecure whispers, the seventh graders will also find the letters for vulnerable, taboo, and anxious. And without thinking too much of it, they’ll soak the letters up with their slices of bread at lunch, the way they’ve been doing, the way they’ve always done. Just like generations before them.
It Won’t Happen to Us
The balloons are tired of the birthday parties and confetti. The confinement. The screams and shrill giggles. The wild children with boogered fingers. The clowns who rub and twist them into dogs, giraffes, swans, swords, and monkeys. “We’re people, too!” the balloons yell, but no one hears them.
So it’s no wonder that the balloons decide to venture out. They’ve heard the stories, of course, of their ancestors who were let go into the deep-blue nothing and never came back. The ones left to die in trees. Caught on telephone wires or light posts.
“It won’t happen to us,” they say, and the balloons go hiking at a wooded city park.
With their heads full of air, helium, and non-thoughts, the balloons have little regard for the world around them, though they’re surprised at all of the trees. The hostile twigs. Threats at every turn. Just like they’d heard.
But they’re not worried. “It won’t happen to us,” they say.
But one by one, they go. Pop pop pop. Their egos and bodies deflated, burst like a toxic appendix.
The balloons watch as their friends and family are taken down in short order.
Still, the ones who are left say, “It won’t happen to us.” They continue on their sylvan adventure.
Pop pop pop. Pop pop pop. Poppoppoppoppop. The pops echo, sound like gunshots.
The balloons never understood why humans kept them on such short strings. They never imagined sticks like pins or how rabid branches could be. Not to mention the teeth of porcupines, the claws of squirrels. Thunderstorms. Hail.
But they continue their mantra. “It won’t happen to us.” Holding firm until the end.
Pop pop pop. Pop pop pop. Pop pop pop.
Poppoppoppoppoppoppoppoppoppoppoppop.
Pop.
Jessica Klimesh (she/her) is a US-based writer and editor whose creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cleaver, trampset, Bending Genres, Ghost Parachute, and Whale Road Review, among others. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net, and she won 3rd Prize in the 2023 South Shore Review Flash Fiction Contest. Learn more at jessicaklimesh.com.
