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2025 Stories Out of School

January 6, 2025

Stories Out of School is an annual flash-fiction contest created by the Academy for Teachers to honor "the most fascinating, difficult, and important job on the planet." We are delighted to partner with them to share the work of the three finalists selected by this year’s judge, Rebecca Makkai: Anne P. Beatty, Mark Mayer, and Anjali Sachdeva. The winning story, “Lockdown Drill,” will also appear in A Public Space No. 32. Congratulations to all.

“Lockdown Drill” by Anne P. Beatty
It was no surprise that more than one of the extraordinary finalists I was able to read addressed the phenomenon of classroom lockdowns—the practice drills that are now a regular part of school life, and the rarer (but not rare enough) reality of the active shooter lockdown. "Lockdown Drill" manages to make a devastating and compelling story out of a routine drill, one extraordinary only in its regularity. The great trick of flash fiction is to give meaning without torturing the meaning, to make poetry without straining the language or the metaphor; and this story does that beautifully. A subject that could easily become macabre or pedantic is handled with great restraint—a restraint that allows unstated emotion to become the evident but invisible heart of the story. —Rebecca Makkai

At the pre-appointed hour, I check the door, pull shades, hit lights. Should I use butcher paper to cover the glass panel on the door, or does that take too much time? We talked about it for forty minutes during a faculty meeting. Now half the teachers do it, half the teachers don’t. I do. To expedite the process, I keep my roll of purple paper, dull as a bruise, behind the scarred filing cabinet with torn pieces of masking tape already on it.

My students hug their knees. We huddle in a corner. We would joke but nothing’s funny. One girl points to a bookshelf’s ledge, eye level for all of us. Scrawled in red marker are the words We are all cannibals.

“Why’s it there?” she whispers. I shrug. We smile; still, nothing’s funny.

Sometimes, though, my students giggle at nothing. I get it. To laugh is to be less terrified. But I have to shush them. Principals come around and bang on the doors, rattle the handles to make sure the locks hold. One principal, if he heard students talking or laughing, came in later and yelled at the students, then yelled at you in front of the students, then yelled at the students some more. Everyone must be silent.

One principal instructed all teachers to make students grab something they could use as a weapon: a stapler, a three-hole punch, a chair, legs jeering out like spikes. She came in, wild-eyed as a bucking horse, and showed students how to swing a stapler like a bat. A girl cried that day. “No weapons,” I said, after the principal left. “You don’t have to do that.”

One year we had red cards and green cards. Slide a green card under the door if everyone is okay, red if someone is injured. What if the shooter sees the cards and then knows people are in the room? Another forty minutes of a faculty meeting. Now everyone has laminated cards in their drawers. No one knows if we are supposed to use them.

The year the code was “Teachers, check your email” on the intercom, half the teachers went into lockdown and the other half checked their email. We did not talk about that in a faculty meeting.

The students whisper to me about the new teacher, who is very old, and who barricaded herself behind two bookshelves during the first drill.

“With her students?” I ask.

“By herself.”

The minutes tick by. Now we are all staring at it. We are all cannibals. Days later, after the “all clear,” after we go back to thesis statements, after we sleep under our down-filled duvets, I will Google the sentence throbbing in my head and learn it’s the title of a work by French anthropologist Claude Levi- Strauss, a book that argues, as one reviewer notes, “there’s no such thing as an advanced versus a primitive society.”

Anne P. Beatty’s essays have appeared in The American Scholar, The Atlantic, New England Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, where she is a high-school English teacher.



“The Prepositions” by Mark Mayer

"The Prepositions" is, on its surface, about language—and it makes fantastic use of language itself, fitting a lifetime of love and loss, fullness and emptiness, into a very short piece. It's gorgeously complicated, and lands a powerful blow in the end. —Rebecca Makkai

“Those of us who teach the language arts,” Ms. Meyer said to her seventh graders every year for twenty years, “sometimes our job is to teach you to know what you already know. For example, the prepositions. Who can tell me what a preposition is?

Not a hand.

“But you know them, better than you know your moms and dads.” And to prove it to them on the board, she wrote: The ghost goes ____ the house. The children supplied into, through, under, around, all the half-invisible words that position a ghost vis-à-vis a house.

Day Two, for review, they played a game: Stand at your desk and make the class guess your preposition without using other prepositions. Above without saying over or on top of or up. Between without saying in or at or across. She used the Taboo buzzer. They did it with gestures, like wizards casting spells.

The unit quiz suggested her lesson plan worked well enough. But the lecture did not say what she so wished it could: the prepositions—they hold your true and secret life.
As she drew on the board, ghosts flying through televisions or smiling inside mirrors or hovering over cradles, she tried to show it was the preposition, not the verb, that moved them. Ghosts don’t flap wings.

In Ms. Meyer’s own house, some spirit put dinner before dessert and cherries atop sundaes and bit by bit made time sequential and space dimensional. Twenty years. She divorced. Her three children grew up and stopped speaking to each other. The most everyday things.
Her mother. Her father. Franklin. His parents. Her half-siblings. Her kids. All gone. The seventh graders too.

But what does gone mean?

Where was not gone’s question. Departed was not its point. Even when the house was full, gone had been there. Will have gone. Will have gone ____ the house.

But Marcy kept on. She got another master’s degree. She volunteered. She married Salvatore with silver hair on his beautiful thighs. They kept a kettle in the bedroom and read in bed drinking dangerously hot peppermint tea.

Was she happy? Was she sad? “You already know the prepositions,” she would say every year. “Your bodies learned them before you ever said mama. Your bodies knew near and with, up and down, as well as you knew hunger.

At holidays, on birthdays, when her kids didn’t call, Sal would ask her, “Do you want a massage?”

Always. Sal had magic hands. They drew your whole life up from your fascia.
Eyes closed as he worked on her, she recalled the seventh graders gesturing like wizards, pushing and tweaking and chopping the air, experts in how the inner world becomes the outer world and the other way around. A ghost flies back and forth.

Mark Mayer teaches creative writing at the University of Memphis.



“Favorite” by Anjali Sachdeva

"Favorite" is the story I relate to most as a former elementary-school teacher myself. Former students do take up space in our memories, some more than others, and running into the adult version of someone you once knew very well, mid-formation, is one of life's stranger miracles. And there are always those students who shine a little too brightly for the classroom -- hard to deal with, but a wonder to observe. —Rebecca Makkai

For Athena

Paul Houghley leans back and lets Atarah Green take his blood. As she smoothly inserts the needle and the bag begins to fill, she pats his shoulder, says, “Just relax. I’ll come back to check on you.”

When he had first arrived at the Red Cross drive, her laugh and a flourish of spilled iodine across the front of her scrubs had caught his attention, set him to scrutinizing her. He was two states and twenty years away from the grim, underfunded school where he’d been her teacher. He did not introduce himself, but when one of the other nurses called, “Atarah, can you help me?” his hunch was confirmed, and he wondered how he could have doubted it.

She had been his favorite, not just of her class but of all the years of classes—a child who emanated an insuppressible energy, as though she contained her own small sun. She was not considered a good student; her previous teachers had labeled her careless and distracted, and she was. Each morning she arrived with her hair in dozens of braids, and within the hour she would be unraveling them, turning order to chaos. She left frayed and filthy every afternoon, singing invented melodies as she zigzagged toward the buses like an exuberant hummingbird.

Once, when sleet had forced the children inside for recess, he had looked up to find that Atarah had wandered away from the TV cart her classmates were clustered around and began drizzling paint into the sink. Of the thirty cups he had poured for that day’s art lesson, only the two in her hands remained. When he stood beside her, he looked down into a psychedelic sunset, layers of purple and orange tempera dancing over each other. He took the cups gently from her hands and laid out the same coloring pages they’d done the week before, but that night he second-guessed himself, emailed her parents, said he couldn’t allow her to waste the school’s scarce resources. At the ensuing conference he saw in her mother’s eyes a longing to know that someone else recognized her daughter’s radiant and jagged soul, and he faltered, weighing duty against impulse until he said, “Never mind about the paint. She’s doing fine.” They were weak words, not nearly enough, when what he meant was that he loved the girl, the way he loved seeing one red umbrella through a gray scrim of rain.

Really, when was anything he could do enough? What was one year of math and snacks and baking soda volcanoes against everything the world threw at children? He should have let her spill paint until the sink overflowed, like a well of color that would wash them all to some brighter place. And yet here she is, confident and bantering with her colleagues as she walks back to him. How grateful he is for the warmth of her hand on his as she says, “Don’t worry, Mr. H, you’re doing just fine.”

Anjali Sachdeva’s short story collection, All the Names They Used for God, was the winner of the 2019 Chautauqua Prize and the 2022 Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and was named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR.



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