Specimens
Every so often, I'll be posting a piece of writing here -- essays, introductions, short short stories, etc.
Snowman on a White Horse
He appeared first after a heavy snow at the end of November. It was, as always, late afternoon, beneath a gray sky. The flakes swept down across the field, and a snowman rode by on a white horse right outside our 6th grade windows. The snowman had no legs but stood atop the saddle as he would on the ground in the snow. His oak branch arms were open as if to embrace the world, and the charcoal briquettes that were his eyes widened with excitement. The long mane and tail of the white horse were thrown every way by the wind. The snowman lifted his top hat with finger like tendrils grown anew from the oak, and tipped it slightly to all us kids. His raisin smile beneath his carrot nose became a raisin smirk. There was a flash of lightning, the sky went purple, and he was gone into the storm.
After we saw it the first time, none of the kids mentioned it. We weren’t sure if Miss Illeana had seen it. But plenty of them drew him without thinking on Art Thursday. The teacher inquired if the pictures were a snowman riding a white horse and a lot of us said Yes. I was surprised at how suspicious she looked after our answer. The next day, Miss Illeana was out sick. When she returned the day after, she looked pale and was quieter than usual. Before, she would often drape an arm around your shoulder if the day had not been kind to you. And her smile was something we all cherished.
The next week it snowed again on Wednesday afternoon. We were deep into a discussion of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Miss Illeana spoke about Carl Jung, yin and yang, and anima and shade, until we couldn’t follow anymore and she sputtered into silence. We wondered who she thought she was talking to us with all those big words and ideas. We were all fans of a tv show that came on right after school, Roger Clobber. There was a lot senseless clobbering and not many words.
Anyway, as if to save her from her pale self, the snowman came trotting by through the white downfall. He waved to us and we ran to the windows. At one point he stopped, and the white horse reared up on its hind legs and the snowman took his hat off. Miss Illeana called for us to return to our seats – once, twice, three times we ignored her. Her voice was weak and scratchy. Finally, she stopped calling and we all sat down once the snowman on the white horse had disappeared into the gray day.
“What are you so busy with at the windows?” she asked us. “What’s so important that you won’t listen to your lessons? And to show your teacher disrespect?” She looked down at her desk top and we could almost see the tears that welled up in her eyes but she wouldn’t let fall. She stood and said she wanted an apology. “Sorry, Miss Illeana,” we said slowly and in unison with a touch of dreary exasperation.
The snows came hard and fast that winter and at lunch time at school we were relegated to the gymnasium where we played a game of dodge ball that was part joy and part survival. Always the last one left was Jake Haskin, who could throw the ball a hundred miles an hour. Always some smaller kid, who’d hid out behind those more lumbering would last till the end and then Jake would mash their faces with a burning slider and laugh like Dr. Doom from the comics.
One dark afternoon, when I’d forgotten my lunch, I went back to the classroom to fetch it, and I saw Miss Illeana sitting at her desk, leaning over the waste basket, propped on her elbow, sweat streaming from her face. She saw me only after I’d grabbed my lunch bag from my desk. She looked up, unwell, and yelled, “Run, I’m about to puke.” As I fled down the hall, I heard her retching until I turned the corner into the hallway that led to the lunch room. I was unable to eat the cold hot dog sandwich my mother had prepared. I wondered why only I brought cold hot dogs for lunch and others had peanut butter and jelly, egg salad, tuna fish, or ham and swiss.
The snowman returned during a brief squall of flurries the day Jake Haskin’s father died. The secretary from the office came to our classroom door and opened it a sliver. Miss Illeana got up and went out to speak with her. A few moments later, the teacher returned and took a note to the back of the room where Jake sat, tormenting the kid who stuttered. Miss gave him the note, he read it, and immediately started balling. She swept him up in her arms, and I remember how beautiful it must have been to be in the embrace of that lavender mohair cardigan. She helped him up the aisle and to the door. Turning to face the class, she said to me, “Betsy, you’re in charge until I get back.”
“Yes, Mam,” I said. I went to the front of the room, stood on her chair, turned to face the chalkboard, bent over and blew a cold hot dog fart at my charges. Hilarity ensued. I got a standing ovation. Just in the middle of my presentation, someone shouted, “The snowman.” We ran to the windows. There was a strong wind that day that blew snow around him like a small tornado. Within its cocoon, we saw him laughing, as the writer put it in one of the boring stories we had to read – wholeheartedly. By the time Miss Illeana returned, the snowman and his white horse had been whirled up into heaven or where ever they came from.
As I walked back to my seat from her desk, she said, “Betsy, what did you all accomplish while I was gone?”
“I started a lesson,” I said, “but then the snowman came.”
“Oh, the snowman, huh?”
“He was laughing.”
“I see,” said Miss Illeana. “Did you children ever ask yourselves why you can see him but I can’t?”
Somebody from the back of the room, I think it was my girlfriend, Drinsy, called out, “Because you don’t want to.”
On the way home from school, the girl who stuttered, Adrean, usually walked along with me. I of course did all the talking, and when she interjected some word or thought I grew impatient with her. On the day of the snowman’s laughter, she took from her pocket a piece of paper. She unfolded it and looked at it for a few seconds. Then she handed it to me and started to say something, like “Shhh, sh, sh, shhshh, sh.” I never caught what she was getting at, but I read the note – Jake Haskin, your father has pasted away. Come to the office.” Adrean was still trying to get out what she meant as she turned to head down the driveway toward her house. “Pasted,” I thought. The school secretary was dumber than Jake Haskin.
It was the day that Jake returned to class that Miss Illeana had begun her lectures on “Feasibility and the Function of Reason.” She must have forgotten that we were 6th graders. No one had any idea what she was speaking about, and she wouldn’t tolerate a whisper or the roll of an eye. Belabored sighs were met with a sentence of detention. Her ramblings played out in front of a drawing of the Trojan Horse that she projected onto the pull-down movie screen. She cast a giant shadow on the ancient world. I tried to tell the school secretary, but all she said was, “Learnin’s learnin.”
That afternoon, after lunch, the snowman rode past through the hail and rain. The white horse’s feathered fetlocks were besmirched with mud and its lovely mane was drenched and plastered against its back. It walked with its head down, slowly, searching the world for sadness. The snowman had his branch arms wrapped around himself and was coughing, choking, expelling plumes of steam. Before ambling out of sight, he spit and his raisin grin went raisin grim. The real difference of that visit from the snowman was that Miss Illeana saw him.
She pointed out the window and said, “Is that the snowman?” And we all answered her in unison with a touch of dreary exasperation. “He’s charming and that horse is adorable,” she said. She didn’t make us take our seats or give us an extra assignment as punishment – I Shall Not Go To The Window While Teacher Is Teaching 500 times. After the snowman had moved on, she told us to read in the book we were currently working on “Ethan Frome” by Edith Wharton. The only thing in the book that made a connection with our lives was the snow. Meanwhile, Miss Illeana sat back in her chair and stared out the window, twisting her hair. I might have been the only one, looking up from my reading, to see a tuft of her mousy brown locks pull away from her head and drift to the classroom floor.
A week later, the floor around Miss Illeana’s desk looked like the barbershop on a busy morning. She was nearly bald and there were wounds and scabs on her head from her scratching. She proposed a Valentine Day party, the giving and receiving of Valentine Cards, a poetry reading, punch and cookies and cake. I got assigned to bring in the potato chips. I told my mother I needed her to buy me three bags of them. Fat chance. She sent me to school the day of the party with a cold hot dog sandwich.
I told Miss Illeana I was sorry but my mother couldn’t afford the potato chips. She said, “That’s no problem, dear, I brought some.” She smiled in my face and even though her head was like a harvested field of stubs, I felt love for her. We set up the party, and once it was going and we were finishing our lunches, sipping fruit punch, getting ready to go head first into the cakes and cookies the kids brought from home, Miss Illeana asked Jake Haskin to come to the front of the room and read the poem he’d brought in. He said he wrote one instead of finding one. All the better she said. It was about how his father had pasted away. He was in tears and she made us give him a round of applause. Somebody in the back blew a raspberry. Laughter followed.
Jake was angry, but just in the nick of time, the snowman rode by, and we went to the window. This time, he stopped, and dismounted from the white horse. He moved along on his bottom biggest ball as if he was on wheels and pulled by magnetic forces. All the way to the big fire escape window where he knocked on the glass with a branch tip. Miss Illeana’s eyes were wide at the sight of him. She opened the big window from inside and he handed her a card in a white envelope. She received it from him with a giggle, he bowed, doffing his hat, and before standing straight, both he and the horse were gone.
Later, when we were good and high on cake and cookies and the red thick plasma of the punch, she asked us if we wanted to see her Valentine from the snowman. She picked up the white envelope and opened it. Inside was a white piece of paper folded once. She opened that and then read from it. “You’re Hot.” Some of the kids Ooooooed and pretended by themselves to be smooching with someone else. Some of us shook our heads in defeat, having received only two Valentines – One from Mitchell Coomer, the accordion playing weakling who was always left at the end of a dodgeball game to have his head bashed and one from Adrean, the girl who stuttered.
The two cards were the same – a big red heart and a skunk with a clothespin on its nose. It read, “Hi, Valentine! I’m Strong For You.” Both made me ill in equal measure. I was only in 6th grade but I didn’t want any of this weird weakness, I wanted Jake Haskin to write me a poem about me. Even a, “You’re Hot,” from the snowman would have sufficed. It wasn’t my first indication that the world wasn’t going to be fair. When school let out, I saw Miss Illeana walk out the back door into the field. The hail and sleet came down so fast then, she disappeared behind its curtain. That was Friday.
On Monday, after a weekend in which my mother actually came into my room late Saturday night and sat on the end of the bed, patting my ankle till I fell asleep, Miss Illeana was blonde. Her hair looked amazing – mid-length, silky, with bangs. We knew it had to be a wig. She also wore a long white dress and white shoes. While she stood at the board and drew a timeline for the Boston Tea Party, we murmured behind her about how pretty she was. The sores on her lips had vanished and were replaced with vanilla white glossy lipstick. The big pimples on her forehead had gone. Her eyes were bright and she took her time with her unintelligible explanations.
Lunch came and with it the cold hot dog sandwich. When I saw it, I gagged. Miss Illeana caught my response to my lunch and she gave me her’s instead -- baloney on buttered white bread, a slice of processed cheese, and a smear of mustard. For dessert – a plastic cup of chocolate pudding. It was like a new day had dawned. It had been snowing lightly all day long, but about mid-way through lunch, a giant rushing wind enveloped the school, the snow fell like an avalanche, and the sky grew nearly dark as night. I finished my last taste of chocolate pudding when the lights all shut out at once.
The next thing we knew, the snowman was at the fire escape window, his raisin smile beaming. He had a bouquet of flowers – daisies with white centers and white stalks. “OK, children,” Miss Illeana called out, “stay in your seats.” For some reason we all did and watched, through dim light, stunned, as she opened the fire escape window, crawled up on to the window sill and, with no coat or anything but her white dress and white shoes, jumped into the storm. The wind came so hard and the snow so fiercely, we only caught a glimpse of the snowman, catching her in his oak branch arms. With his long carrot nose cocked upward, and, with a lascivious grin, he made off with her. Over the howling of the gale, we heard the white horse galloping away across the frozen field.
When we were sure she was leaving, I wanted to ask her if I could have her lavender cardigan, but we dared not speak as she made her transition to the frozen world. So, I took it anyway and it came in handy. I wore it to sleep when my mother was too drunk to come and say goodnight. I wore it a few years later when me and Jake Haskin did it on a mildewed love seat in the back part of an abandoned barn. I wore it when I heard my father pasted away, and on the day I finally set out across the vast white field for spring.
Snowman on a White Horse
He appeared first after a heavy snow at the end of November. It was, as always, late afternoon, beneath a gray sky. The flakes swept down across the field, and a snowman rode by on a white horse right outside our 6th grade windows. The snowman had no legs but stood atop the saddle as he would on the ground in the snow. His oak branch arms were open as if to embrace the world, and the charcoal briquettes that were his eyes widened with excitement. The long mane and tail of the white horse were thrown every way by the wind. The snowman lifted his top hat with finger like tendrils grown anew from the oak, and tipped it slightly to all us kids. His raisin smile beneath his carrot nose became a raisin smirk. There was a flash of lightning, the sky went purple, and he was gone into the storm.
After we saw it the first time, none of the kids mentioned it. We weren’t sure if Miss Illeana had seen it. But plenty of them drew him without thinking on Art Thursday. The teacher inquired if the pictures were a snowman riding a white horse and a lot of us said Yes. I was surprised at how suspicious she looked after our answer. The next day, Miss Illeana was out sick. When she returned the day after, she looked pale and was quieter than usual. Before, she would often drape an arm around your shoulder if the day had not been kind to you. And her smile was something we all cherished.
The next week it snowed again on Wednesday afternoon. We were deep into a discussion of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Miss Illeana spoke about Carl Jung, yin and yang, and anima and shade, until we couldn’t follow anymore and she sputtered into silence. We wondered who she thought she was talking to us with all those big words and ideas. We were all fans of a tv show that came on right after school, Roger Clobber. There was a lot senseless clobbering and not many words.
Anyway, as if to save her from her pale self, the snowman came trotting by through the white downfall. He waved to us and we ran to the windows. At one point he stopped, and the white horse reared up on its hind legs and the snowman took his hat off. Miss Illeana called for us to return to our seats – once, twice, three times we ignored her. Her voice was weak and scratchy. Finally, she stopped calling and we all sat down once the snowman on the white horse had disappeared into the gray day.
“What are you so busy with at the windows?” she asked us. “What’s so important that you won’t listen to your lessons? And to show your teacher disrespect?” She looked down at her desk top and we could almost see the tears that welled up in her eyes but she wouldn’t let fall. She stood and said she wanted an apology. “Sorry, Miss Illeana,” we said slowly and in unison with a touch of dreary exasperation.
The snows came hard and fast that winter and at lunch time at school we were relegated to the gymnasium where we played a game of dodge ball that was part joy and part survival. Always the last one left was Jake Haskin, who could throw the ball a hundred miles an hour. Always some smaller kid, who’d hid out behind those more lumbering would last till the end and then Jake would mash their faces with a burning slider and laugh like Dr. Doom from the comics.
One dark afternoon, when I’d forgotten my lunch, I went back to the classroom to fetch it, and I saw Miss Illeana sitting at her desk, leaning over the waste basket, propped on her elbow, sweat streaming from her face. She saw me only after I’d grabbed my lunch bag from my desk. She looked up, unwell, and yelled, “Run, I’m about to puke.” As I fled down the hall, I heard her retching until I turned the corner into the hallway that led to the lunch room. I was unable to eat the cold hot dog sandwich my mother had prepared. I wondered why only I brought cold hot dogs for lunch and others had peanut butter and jelly, egg salad, tuna fish, or ham and swiss.
The snowman returned during a brief squall of flurries the day Jake Haskin’s father died. The secretary from the office came to our classroom door and opened it a sliver. Miss Illeana got up and went out to speak with her. A few moments later, the teacher returned and took a note to the back of the room where Jake sat, tormenting the kid who stuttered. Miss gave him the note, he read it, and immediately started balling. She swept him up in her arms, and I remember how beautiful it must have been to be in the embrace of that lavender mohair cardigan. She helped him up the aisle and to the door. Turning to face the class, she said to me, “Betsy, you’re in charge until I get back.”
“Yes, Mam,” I said. I went to the front of the room, stood on her chair, turned to face the chalkboard, bent over and blew a cold hot dog fart at my charges. Hilarity ensued. I got a standing ovation. Just in the middle of my presentation, someone shouted, “The snowman.” We ran to the windows. There was a strong wind that day that blew snow around him like a small tornado. Within its cocoon, we saw him laughing, as the writer put it in one of the boring stories we had to read – wholeheartedly. By the time Miss Illeana returned, the snowman and his white horse had been whirled up into heaven or where ever they came from.
As I walked back to my seat from her desk, she said, “Betsy, what did you all accomplish while I was gone?”
“I started a lesson,” I said, “but then the snowman came.”
“Oh, the snowman, huh?”
“He was laughing.”
“I see,” said Miss Illeana. “Did you children ever ask yourselves why you can see him but I can’t?”
Somebody from the back of the room, I think it was my girlfriend, Drinsy, called out, “Because you don’t want to.”
On the way home from school, the girl who stuttered, Adrean, usually walked along with me. I of course did all the talking, and when she interjected some word or thought I grew impatient with her. On the day of the snowman’s laughter, she took from her pocket a piece of paper. She unfolded it and looked at it for a few seconds. Then she handed it to me and started to say something, like “Shhh, sh, sh, shhshh, sh.” I never caught what she was getting at, but I read the note – Jake Haskin, your father has pasted away. Come to the office.” Adrean was still trying to get out what she meant as she turned to head down the driveway toward her house. “Pasted,” I thought. The school secretary was dumber than Jake Haskin.
It was the day that Jake returned to class that Miss Illeana had begun her lectures on “Feasibility and the Function of Reason.” She must have forgotten that we were 6th graders. No one had any idea what she was speaking about, and she wouldn’t tolerate a whisper or the roll of an eye. Belabored sighs were met with a sentence of detention. Her ramblings played out in front of a drawing of the Trojan Horse that she projected onto the pull-down movie screen. She cast a giant shadow on the ancient world. I tried to tell the school secretary, but all she said was, “Learnin’s learnin.”
That afternoon, after lunch, the snowman rode past through the hail and rain. The white horse’s feathered fetlocks were besmirched with mud and its lovely mane was drenched and plastered against its back. It walked with its head down, slowly, searching the world for sadness. The snowman had his branch arms wrapped around himself and was coughing, choking, expelling plumes of steam. Before ambling out of sight, he spit and his raisin grin went raisin grim. The real difference of that visit from the snowman was that Miss Illeana saw him.
She pointed out the window and said, “Is that the snowman?” And we all answered her in unison with a touch of dreary exasperation. “He’s charming and that horse is adorable,” she said. She didn’t make us take our seats or give us an extra assignment as punishment – I Shall Not Go To The Window While Teacher Is Teaching 500 times. After the snowman had moved on, she told us to read in the book we were currently working on “Ethan Frome” by Edith Wharton. The only thing in the book that made a connection with our lives was the snow. Meanwhile, Miss Illeana sat back in her chair and stared out the window, twisting her hair. I might have been the only one, looking up from my reading, to see a tuft of her mousy brown locks pull away from her head and drift to the classroom floor.
A week later, the floor around Miss Illeana’s desk looked like the barbershop on a busy morning. She was nearly bald and there were wounds and scabs on her head from her scratching. She proposed a Valentine Day party, the giving and receiving of Valentine Cards, a poetry reading, punch and cookies and cake. I got assigned to bring in the potato chips. I told my mother I needed her to buy me three bags of them. Fat chance. She sent me to school the day of the party with a cold hot dog sandwich.
I told Miss Illeana I was sorry but my mother couldn’t afford the potato chips. She said, “That’s no problem, dear, I brought some.” She smiled in my face and even though her head was like a harvested field of stubs, I felt love for her. We set up the party, and once it was going and we were finishing our lunches, sipping fruit punch, getting ready to go head first into the cakes and cookies the kids brought from home, Miss Illeana asked Jake Haskin to come to the front of the room and read the poem he’d brought in. He said he wrote one instead of finding one. All the better she said. It was about how his father had pasted away. He was in tears and she made us give him a round of applause. Somebody in the back blew a raspberry. Laughter followed.
Jake was angry, but just in the nick of time, the snowman rode by, and we went to the window. This time, he stopped, and dismounted from the white horse. He moved along on his bottom biggest ball as if he was on wheels and pulled by magnetic forces. All the way to the big fire escape window where he knocked on the glass with a branch tip. Miss Illeana’s eyes were wide at the sight of him. She opened the big window from inside and he handed her a card in a white envelope. She received it from him with a giggle, he bowed, doffing his hat, and before standing straight, both he and the horse were gone.
Later, when we were good and high on cake and cookies and the red thick plasma of the punch, she asked us if we wanted to see her Valentine from the snowman. She picked up the white envelope and opened it. Inside was a white piece of paper folded once. She opened that and then read from it. “You’re Hot.” Some of the kids Ooooooed and pretended by themselves to be smooching with someone else. Some of us shook our heads in defeat, having received only two Valentines – One from Mitchell Coomer, the accordion playing weakling who was always left at the end of a dodgeball game to have his head bashed and one from Adrean, the girl who stuttered.
The two cards were the same – a big red heart and a skunk with a clothespin on its nose. It read, “Hi, Valentine! I’m Strong For You.” Both made me ill in equal measure. I was only in 6th grade but I didn’t want any of this weird weakness, I wanted Jake Haskin to write me a poem about me. Even a, “You’re Hot,” from the snowman would have sufficed. It wasn’t my first indication that the world wasn’t going to be fair. When school let out, I saw Miss Illeana walk out the back door into the field. The hail and sleet came down so fast then, she disappeared behind its curtain. That was Friday.
On Monday, after a weekend in which my mother actually came into my room late Saturday night and sat on the end of the bed, patting my ankle till I fell asleep, Miss Illeana was blonde. Her hair looked amazing – mid-length, silky, with bangs. We knew it had to be a wig. She also wore a long white dress and white shoes. While she stood at the board and drew a timeline for the Boston Tea Party, we murmured behind her about how pretty she was. The sores on her lips had vanished and were replaced with vanilla white glossy lipstick. The big pimples on her forehead had gone. Her eyes were bright and she took her time with her unintelligible explanations.
Lunch came and with it the cold hot dog sandwich. When I saw it, I gagged. Miss Illeana caught my response to my lunch and she gave me her’s instead -- baloney on buttered white bread, a slice of processed cheese, and a smear of mustard. For dessert – a plastic cup of chocolate pudding. It was like a new day had dawned. It had been snowing lightly all day long, but about mid-way through lunch, a giant rushing wind enveloped the school, the snow fell like an avalanche, and the sky grew nearly dark as night. I finished my last taste of chocolate pudding when the lights all shut out at once.
The next thing we knew, the snowman was at the fire escape window, his raisin smile beaming. He had a bouquet of flowers – daisies with white centers and white stalks. “OK, children,” Miss Illeana called out, “stay in your seats.” For some reason we all did and watched, through dim light, stunned, as she opened the fire escape window, crawled up on to the window sill and, with no coat or anything but her white dress and white shoes, jumped into the storm. The wind came so hard and the snow so fiercely, we only caught a glimpse of the snowman, catching her in his oak branch arms. With his long carrot nose cocked upward, and, with a lascivious grin, he made off with her. Over the howling of the gale, we heard the white horse galloping away across the frozen field.
When we were sure she was leaving, I wanted to ask her if I could have her lavender cardigan, but we dared not speak as she made her transition to the frozen world. So, I took it anyway and it came in handy. I wore it to sleep when my mother was too drunk to come and say goodnight. I wore it a few years later when me and Jake Haskin did it on a mildewed love seat in the back part of an abandoned barn. I wore it when I heard my father pasted away, and on the day I finally set out across the vast white field for spring.