In Another Life

and the one we are living now

I am doing a writing round robin. Each day we get a prompt and write about it.

Today’s prompt: “in another life.” But what I want to write about is what happened today, in this life. The fourth-grade student worked on painting her clay mask, with its huge eyes. We had talked about stylization, exaggerating parts of the face. As she dipped her brush in the blue glaze and applied it to the red clay, she chatted with her tablemates. I was rushing around the room. It had been a crazy morning, with an unannounced fire drill that cut into my prep time and left me scrambling to get the brushes and water containers out on the tables. The students were excited to paint, to learn about the process, and that their masks would go into an oven that heated up to over one thousand degrees, transforming the overglaze into clear glass.

So, while I was pouring out underglaze into the messy ice cube trays we use, “Ms. K., I need more green,” and filling yogurt containers with water, “rinse your brush, between colors,” I heard this child turn to her tablemates, and say, “Yesterday, I saw a man get killed on the news.” My chest turned cold, my fingers tingled, an urgent urge to do something. Should I make her stop? She said, “Yes, he was shot, and he twitched when they shot him.” The other kids appeared nonplussed. One student said, “Yes, I know about that,” but the others stayed outside the conversation, as though two classmates were talking about a tv show they hadn’t seen or heard of. In another life, this would be a show that a nine-year-old should never be allowed to watch, not the broken world in which we live.