“Night Classes at the A-Bomb Boarding School”

Originally published in Daybreaking Zine, now defunct.

excerpted from the Hardtack Spectator:

NIGHT CLASSES AT THE A-BOMB BOARDING SCHOOL

by Monty Teak

Continued from page 2

but of course there’s more to it than that. A number of those who went missing had spoken to friends and family about enrollment in an unspecified night school. No written material directly from or about the school has ever been found in any of their belongings.

In the weeks leading up to their disappearance, each woman began behaving strangely. Many of the soon-to-be-missing would sleep for long hours during the day, ignoring work, appointments, or other obligations. All of them could be found awake deep into the belly of the night, though what kept them up seemed to vary. The family of Helena B. awoke to find complex equations sprawled across their Formica countertops in carefully arranged lines of flour. Beatrice L. spent hours kneeling in front of her bathtub, dropping each of her son’s marbles into the water. She noted the height of the splashes on the wall with lipstick hashmarks.

Others were less active. Laura C.’s husband watched her get out of bed and stride down the stairs every night at 10:54 PM. Then the TV would click on. Perfectly mundane, except that instead of hearing the indistinct murmur of broadcast voices through the couple’s thin floorboards, he’d hear an undulating buzz like the cicadas of his Pennsylvania childhood. On the rare night that he descended the stairs to check on Laura, the TV would flick off as his bare foot kissed the bottom step.

The night before Laura’s disappearance, her husband asked what she’d been learning at her “alleged night school.”

“How to reach escape velocity,” she said. “How to leave nothing of worth behind.”