Her English teacher called her Mousy, perhaps because she often wore a wooden mouse pin with red rhinestone eyes and a thin leather strip for a tail. She didn’t mind. The pin had been her mother’s idea of adorable. There was a lot of confusion in those days. Roman soldiers didn’t particularly float her boat, for instance. All the same, she wrote a story about two of them once, and to her enormous surprise, her teacher, a former Jesuit priest, now happily married to a former nun and teaching at her Lutheran all-girls school, was so impressed with her story, he asked if he could have it. She was flattered and said of course and handed over her exercise book, almost empty otherwise. Since she wasn’t interested in Roman soldiers in the first place and soon couldn’t remember what she had written, she was hardly going to miss the story. Not long afterwards, the school decided to let the teacher go. Some of his views were considered too radical for an all-girls school. This in contrast to one of the Latin teachers who was rumored to have an affair with either another teacher or one of the older students; he got away with a stern warning.
Meanwhile what did fiercely interest her were boys and her feelings about one or the other. There was, for example, a gorgeous blond boy who on warm late summer afternoons sat at a street corner opposite the public library and played his guitar, surrounded by friends and whoever else wanted to listen. Sometimes he sang. His long blond hair fell into his face as he bent over his guitar, and she was lost. She liked the sight of him almost more than the music, though he played songs she knew and liked. She couldn’t possibly go up to him and tell him how beautiful he was and how much she would like to kiss him. It just wasn’t done. One day, though, she talked to one of his friends in the periphery of the circle around him, and, to her surprise, got not only the boy’s name but also his phone number, which she carried around for two weeks before calling him from a yellow public payphone booth. He wasn’t at home, however, and she only got to talk to his father for a few minutes. His father was friendly but somewhat condescending and not very helpful, didn’t suggest a call back time or ask for a call back number. She never tried calling again. She walked by the corner opposite the library many more times just in case. After all, there were always books to borrow and return. But it was chillier now, and it rained often, and nobody was ever there again. Perhaps she had scared the beautiful guitar player away? It was difficult to tell.
When it didn’t rain, she now took solitary walks around City Lake, heard frogs a few times, looked at the last of the hardy flowers that remained, and shuffled through the fallen leaves on the ground. When it did rain, she stayed home and wrote about the boy. She didn’t give his name and didn’t make one up for him either. She simply called him the blond boy and wrote how his image drew her to the lake, luring her with laughter and a few songs, and so she followed. Around and around they went, swaying and gliding to some magical music no one else could hear. How she longed for him in those musings. The rest of the world could only hear the traffic of the city, now and again a siren, the yapping of dogs, bird calls, and squirrels rustling in the fallen leaves, and once in a while a shrill whistle, probably summoning some dog.
By now she had a new English teacher, and when she showed him the story which still made her skin prickle when she read it to herself, he looked into her eyes briefly, then looked away. “I don’t know what to say,” he said. She thanked him and took her exercise book back, preparing to wonder for the rest of her days if it would have been better had she once more written about two Roman soldiers. Even had she wanted to, though, she couldn’t remember a word of what she had written about them before. After all, they hadn’t interested her in the least.
Beate Sigriddaughter, www.sigriddaughter.net, lives in Silver City, New Mexico (Land of Enchantment), where she was poet laureate from 2017 to 2019. Her poetry and short prose are widely published in literary magazines. Recent book publications include a poetry collection, Wild Flowers and a novel, Soleil Madera.