These Are the Things He Liked - Kent Wright

Mrs. Hardwick wrote the assignment on the blackboard. This was the season for happy thoughts she said with that sharp look of hers. “Now get to work and no talking.” She went out the door. For a few seconds no one said a word, not until the shadow on the other side of the frosted glass faded away. It was one of her tricks to catch them out. Then there were murmurs and shortly a word here and a word there could be made out between students. The smarties in the sixth grade started to arrange their paper and got pencils out ready to start writing about their favorite things. Others were already day dreaming over their empty desktops.

Leonard looked out the window with the paper candle taped in it. It was next to his seat and he could see the row of small houses that lined Plum Street. There weren’t many and they ended where the street turned right and ran along the railroad tracks. Behind the houses was a grey; raw wooden fence that undulated like a snake but never quite fell down. The shacks on the other side of that fence were all stuck together with pieces of tin and unpainted wood. From there on the second floor of the school one of the kids had said it would look like one of her grandma’s quilts if you didn’t know it Staggsville and the kind that lived there. It was called Staggsville because Joe Staggs owned those dirty shacks and rented them out to Kentuckians like Leonard’s family. They picked up garbage, things like that.

Leonard was already fifteen his Ma told him. Fourteen, fifteen, he didn’t care. He didn’t care if he passed or not because next year when he turned sixteen he could quite school. He didn’t care to tell Mrs. Hardwick or anybody what his favorite things were. But she would flunk him sure if he wrote that being sixteen so he could quite this fucking school was one of them. And he sure wasn’t going to tell her or anyone else that his favorite thing, the thing he couldn’t push out of his head no matter how much he shoved, was the calf his Granny had let him feed with a bottle when he was a boy. The one that would lay with its head in his lap and lick his arm with its long, thick black and pink tongue.