by Andy Gottschalk
Kimmy was a big girl, ate nails for breakfast, dented kids’ faces, and painted their eyes oil-black with her fists.
In PE, she had a license to clobber, and Mr. Mitchum glided in on his swivel chair to give words of tepid encouragement to her adversary. He liked that he had a tireless athlete among his students. Kimmy could dribble and alley-oop. Hustle. If provoked, she pulled hair. Several girls had their athletic ponies yanked by Kimmy, girls who overstepped their boundaries by calling her a butch.
At lunch, we ate at a long low table, the girls at one end in a clandestine huddle, excluding us with their curtained partition of long oil-spill manes. At the other end, Kimmy joined us boys. Each of us had mealy red apples. We presented them to Kimmy, who tore eerie jack-o-lantern faces in their sides with her dogtooth incisors, and, at recess, she left them sitting in a row outside. Kimmy didn’t need to do anything more after that. The apple faces browned and rotted, like a collection of shrunken heads, and the crimson skins shriveled and screamed in the sun while we sat learning multiplication tables that went, like a feeble song, eight times eight equals sixty-four, and nine times nine equals eighty-one.
Andy Gottschalk is a writer and artist from Kansas. His films have been exhibited at the Yale Student Film Festival and GIPHY Film Festival. He has fiction in Rougarou and an essay forthcoming in Post Road magazine. Follow him @andygottschalk on Twitter.
