Noah knew a person living in Mexico ought to have a better command of Spanish than he had. Sitting on his porch one day with the newspaper El Universal, he tried to read an article, but after ten minutes of wondering why some of those sentences seemed to have so many pronouns, he laid the paper down, frustrated by his own ignorance. Back in high school, he had heard that Spanish was easy. Who was telling those lies? This wasn’t easy. Letting out a heavy sigh, he rose and went in the house to look at something else on the computer, as if his brief ramble in the desert of incomprehension had left him needing to go for a swim in a language he actually knew. Eventually, he drifted into email to find a message from his mother, telling him that one of his grammar school teachers back in New Jersey had recently retired. The mention of Mrs. Wanderbeg brought back memories of a particular English class.

*

           Jane was a thin girl with light brown curly hair that fell heavily around her shoulders. Jane and Noah were both in Mrs. Wanderbeg’s fifth-grade, where Jane sat in the back of the room. As Noah thought of Jane later, he imagined that she was always hoping to avoid being noticed by Mrs. Wanderbeg, a generally kind woman, but her demands for knowledge from the students made her a bit frightening. The school year had slowly drifted from the short-sleeve memories of watching butterflies on hot days to jackets in a chilly breeze. Noah remembered the time of year because a storm had come through over the weekend, and on Monday after school he had been walking through piles of red leaves on the sidewalk when he found an old bird’s nest that had blown down. He took the nest home, put it on his dresser, and filled it with summer sea shells.

           “Where did you get the bird nest?” his twin brother Nolan had asked.

           “In front of Mr. Sweeney’s house.”

           “If I give you my new comic books, can I have it?”

           “I already read your comic books,” Noah had replied.

           Sitting in his house in Mexico, thinking back on that English class, Noah remembered that only a few days after he found the bird’s nest, Mrs. Wanderbeg had brought in a poem called Autumn, with a first verse reading:

           The morns are meeker than they were,

           The nuts are getting brown;

           The berry’s cheek is plumper,

           The rose is out of town.

           Copies of the poem were distributed to the class, with the more avid students, like Noah, immediately reading the poem to themselves. “Here’s a poem about this time of year,” Mrs. Wanderbeg said. “It’s by a poet named Emily Dickinson, who lived a hundred years ago.” A hundred years ago! This was a clear danger signal for many of the students. Something so old would surely be a problem. “Let’s take turns reading lines and then we’ll talk about them. Jane, would you read the first line?”

           Like other kids in class, Noah turned to see Jane, who looked at the teacher with an expression as though she had been hit with a stick, then stared down at the paper.

           “Please stand, Jane, and read the first line.”

           Slowly Jane stood, then continued standing silently for five seconds, ten, fifteen, and at last she said, “The” and paused. A moment later, in a soft voice, she said, “I don’t know the next word.”

           “Morns,” Mrs. Wanderbeg said.

           “What are morns?” a boy asked loudly without raising his hand.

           “Who can tell us what a morn is?” Mrs. Wanderbeg asked, looking around.

           There was a further brief silence, until a girl near the front raised her hand and was called on. “It means morning.”

           “Then why don’t they say morning?” the same boy asked.

           “This is poetry,” Mrs. Wanderbeg answered mysteriously, helping to teach the class that poetry is something you can’t understand and should probably avoid if possible. “Continue Jane.”

           “The…morns………..are…m— m— m—” Some of the kids laughed.

           Mrs. Wanderbeg finally decided Jane’s medieval moment was over, saying, “OK, Jane, sit down. Who can finish reading the line?”

           That evening, Noah and Nolan were doing homework to write a short paragraph about the poem. Nolan mentioned Jane trying to read that morning, and Noah remembered he had almost felt embarrassed before Jane even started, knowing what was going to happen. Why didn’t Mrs. Wanderbeg know?

           “That girl needs help,” Nolan said.

           “Maybe I’ll help her,” Noah said.

           “How could you help her? You’re not a teacher.”

           But Noah had approached Jane and offered to help her with reading. He was surprised that rather than the grateful yes he had expected, her reaction was further embarrassment, keeping her eyes to the ground as she hurried away.

*

           Returning to the porch after reading his mother’s email, Noah picked up the Mexican newspaper lying on the table. How am I different from Jane? he thought, tapping the folded paper on his knee. But of course he knew. Jane had no problem speaking English, even though she struggled with the shapes of letters. Noah could clearly read every word, but that didn’t help him with knowing Spanish. He took a drink from the beer he had brought outside, then looked out at his yard where the tree by the gate was filled with red flowers. He glanced at the newspaper he was holding and thought Thank God nobody is asking me to stand and read this out loud.

_{(Flash Fiction from The Hemlock’s Issue 6, Winter 2024)}

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