And now we line up, waiting for the Teacher.

We sold you bad stocks. We took care of your kids while you pursued your career. We cooked you that meal from the specials board you liked so much, the one you told your friends about. We put you forward for that job you just interviewed for.

This is it. One solution. One certainty.

It could be the wind or the situation, but up here, it’s silent. Like the world has been turned down. We are not talking. We don’t have to. But everything below seems quiet. We know that people are looking at us. And they know who we are. What we are going to do. But we look out across the capital. Not down at them. They hold their breath. We breathe in, hold, one-two-three, out. And repeat.

Waiting. For the Teacher. The trigger.

Us. The People of Choice. We help run the youth club for free so your kid isn’t on the street getting into trouble again. We know your repeat prescription just by looking at your face. We pushed forward with the disciplinary hearing when you reported your supervisor for indecent behaviour. You cried on our couch when your sister passed away so suddenly.

We are still.

The teacher emerges. We don’t hear her, there is no sound, but we know she is there. She walks out to the centre spot, turns her back to the growing audience, lifts her arms out to the side and lets herself fall backwards.

There’s a short scream as her feet leave the platform. It’s the first thing we hear. The next thing is her body hitting cement. Then another shriek. And the volume gets turned back up.

We know what we have to do.

No more waiting.

This is legacy.

110

236 – TEACHER

The year fours had been learning about fronted adverbials and they’d shown how well they could overuse them in the thirty stories she had marked the night before. She had needed the wine. Mostly, they were terrible. Often, they were worse than that. But it was another tick off the curriculum and that’s what counts.

It wasn’t so much about the creativity of their stories as it was the grammar and sentence construction. And that made the Teacher sad for the students she loved, who were only getting to use one side of their brains, and sadder for herself that she was helping to facilitate this manner of education.

She sits up in her bed and sighs at the view from her window. There’s a pile of books on her bedside table and half a bottle of pinot grigio that helped her tick a million adverbs before she drifted away from the meaninglessness of her job into quiet, lonely slumber.

The bed is too big.

The frying pan is too wide.