Watermelon
by Mary Miller
Mr. Fuller was the new choir teacher. He had a round face and a love of boys. Before we sang, he had us lie on our backs and breathe in the icy waters. Feel the waves lick your neck, he'd say, the sting of peppermint in the back of your throat. Your boat's collapsed and you didn't think you'd need a life preserver. Feel the pressure build. It builds and builds, like when you love someone so much your heart could burst, your heart could fucking burst under the weight of it.
After he drowned us, he'd make us form a train and rub each other's shoulders. This went on for months and nobody saying anything.Mr. Fuller invited the more troubled boys over to his house, got them out of situations he called pickles, grilled burgers.
I went over there with a boy and watched him worry a knife into his foot while Mr. Fuller was inside slicing tomatoes. We were Indian style on a rotting deck. A long way to fall, I said. Blah, he said, blah. He wasn't the kind of boy who held your hand, which was why I liked him, but still I wanted him to reach over and take it. Instead, he unfurled my palm and put the knife in it. Don't give it back to me, he said, no matter what I tell you don't give it back.
He lifted his t-shirt to show me the swastika carved into his chest. Small and red, it fell in the same spot as the angel on my necklace.
Mr. Fuller led us down the stairs to a square of concrete. He pulled a couple of chairs off a stack and nodded so we sat while he flipped meat.
He talked to the boy without the obvious questions of school and home. I wanted to talk to the boy like that, but mostly I said nothing because I didn't want to say the wrong things. I scratched my elbow, my ankle, my elbow, my elbow, my ankle. The magazines I read advised me to lightly scratch my appendages to bring the attention back to me, but once you scratch something it starts to itch.
His dog was what my father would call yippy, or yappy. It ran up and down inside the path it had worn. I watched it run and thought about how, when we sang, Mr. Fuller walked slowly, his hands behind his back and his feet going heel-toe, heel-toe, heel-toe. Sometimes he leaned down and put his ear to my lips and half the time I was just staring at the boy and mouthing wa-ter-mel-on, wa-ter-mel-on, wa-ter-mel-on. The other half I was singing my heart out.
Mary Miller's stories can be found online at Vestal Review, elimae, Frigg, juked, and Smokelong Quarterly, among other places. She has work forthcoming in Swink, KNOCK, and Noo Journal.