There was an assembly. I and the other girls who were in my grade at
SKA students were sitting on bleachers and being spoken to by
Morah Kadosh, our eleventh grade Prophets teacher. Then two past students of hers, both of them now old and white-haired themselves, came in and prompted us to cheer and whoop for Morah. Those two students had made a mini
nature documentary and showed it to us. It documented how a small patch of lakeside
forest was devastated in order to lay down a road from the dock of the lake to a small
elementary school. The onscreen ‘narrative’ flashed A few days ago in white letters, and then I watched a few of the trees being cut down by
chain saw- what used to be forest was now flooded with
light.
I was leaning over the edge of the little lake, really sad that its
ecosystem would be destroyed. Behind me was the school for which the road was being built. I found a little alligator, tiny- perhaps it was really a
terrapin- on the shore. It opened its tiny
jaws wide and I was tempted to put a twig or something between them to hold them
open. Then one of the
students from the school came walking by, she was 9 or 10 years old. I showed the animal to her.
I started talking, or maybe only thinking, about the school. At one time a teacher there had been fired for teaching works to her 5th grade
English class that were
inappropriate- they involved a
penis, a 5 foot long penis. The teacher had been pressured by
community groups to admit that it was 5 feet long, and not 9 feet, as she claimed. In fact she was still teaching a new class, at a new school, about the same penis.
I saw a
constrictor snake and thought, “this is a penis”. But, it wasn’t five feet long, it was nine feet long. I was in the
water of the lake, and the snake/penis was tightening around my arm. I
couldn’t get free. Then I was in the center of the lake, trying to
swim with a snake making it hard for me to move. The snake wasn’t very wide, but it was very, very strong. I put my right arm (the free one) onto the snake to try to pull it off but just when I did that I started rapidly to
sink, because I had no hands free to swim with anymore, and I couldn’t let go of the snake. I heard a loud collective
gasp as the many people who had been sitting around the lake, much as they would have around a pool at a
backyard party- at small round café tables- realized that I wasn’t faking and I was going to drown. I knew my
father was sitting there.