(9) Abigail Swoboda: The Parade to the Grave
They found the body on a Wednesday. Nothing happens on Wednesdays, except for maybe math quizzes and the slow creep of an opaque, overcast sky. And this is where death found its opportunity, in the dreary crease of the midweek day. They found him in his closet in his own room, hanging there next to his formal shirts and third grade dioramas. His note was sealed in a plastic bag that was shoved into his pants against his cold, dead ass. The police took the note and put it into a different plastic bag.
The town whispered his name: Elliot. He was in my third period trig class. They dared not say his name as loudly as they cried out sine! cosine! tangent! He would never know that he had received a B+ on the last quiz he took. This was better than I had done, but I was still breathing.
On Thursday, school was still in session, but normal classes were cancelled, and everyone was assigned to a classroom to talk about what had happened. If you didn’t want to talk, you still had to go to the room so that you could listen. If you didn’t want to listen, then you had to throw up so that you wouldn’t be allowed to go to school for twenty-four hours, but only several people elected this last option.
I was assigned to room 215, which was Mr. J’s room. Mr. J was my English teacher. His full last name was not “J,” but it was so long that most people either could not pronounce it or did not care to put their time into doing so, so everyone just called him Mr. J.
He had set up the room so that all the desks formed a large, angular pseudo-circle. As everyone came into the room and sat down, no one said anything and found their place around the circle in silence. Mr. J began writing on the chalk board and it came out jagged and doubled, as the nub of yellow chalk he was using had split in the middle. We stayed silent as the chalk screeched out Mr. J’s message.
In Mr. J’s scrawling cursive, the class mouthed in unison:
Elliot—
I’m sorry.
Only Mr. J had forgotten to cross the “t” in “Elliot” so that it looked like Elliol, so I started laughing—hysterically, louder and louder and louder, until, in between my guffaws, Mr. J pulled a pistol from out of his pants and placed it in between his teeth and tensed his finger around the trigger and the whole class watched as Mr. J’s head exploded in shades of red across his misspelled apology. The silence was shattered by the shot, and several people started to sob, others kicked away from their desks and ran from the room, and the girl next to me started furiously pushing her fingers through the pages of the English textbook she had open in front of her, working her way through centuries of literature in quick flicks of her fingers. I wondered which stories she touched, which phrases, which words, and I wondered which words, which phrases, which stories touched her back. I kept staring at the board, looking intensely at the uncrossed “t” in Elliot that looked like an “l.” An “l” didn’t make sense there, but there it was, nonetheless: an “l.” I watched the “l” carefully, just in case it was suddenly crossed by some invisible hand, but it was not.
I started to laugh again at the absurdity of it all.
I laughed and laughed and laughed my way on top of my desk, where I stood above the hysteria and gore and shouted his name for those who were too afraid to do so themselves. Elliot! Elliot! Elliot! Elliot. I screamed it like I had during the night we shared together, the night where we lay tangled in each other’s mess, relishing in each other’s sadness and displaced pleasure. I had stripped my top off carefully in front of him, my fingers shaky and warm. And he had looked down at my breasts. “Oh,” he had said, without inflection, and I wondered if he had ever seen breasts so white. “I only like the ones like this,” he had said, tracing the shape of a woman with his fingers in the air. He had said it like a person might say “I only like the green ones” to someone offering them a handful of Skittles.
I laughed and laughed until the world faded around me, and I fell back down into the chaos of the world below.
On Friday, school was cancelled. It was revealed that Elliot’s note had been addressed to Mr. J, and that it was a love note, suffocated within the plastic bag shoved into his pants.
At Mr. J’s house, investigators uncovered an unpublished manuscript entitled The Parade to the Grave. In the margins of every page, he had drawn pictures of Elliot naked in colored pencils all in shades of red. This manuscript was eventually published without the pictures of Elliot, under Mr. J’s full name, which no one had cared to learn when he was alive, so it was as if no one at all had written the book. Like it had just started existing. The book said things like: “Your body is just a host for a brain; that’s all you are,” which six people used as their senior quote that year, attributing it to “anonymous.”
The exact details of the tragedy faded with time, but the whispers continued, and I took every opportunity to shout his name back to those cowards who so badly did not want to hear it, to hear me. But you cannot growl at chaos, and I was left alone to laugh and to wonder if it was Mr. J’s unrequited love that had led Elliot’s parade to his grave or my pale, pale, anything-but-green Skittle breasts.
Abigail Swoboda is a queer writer based in Philly, where they can be found in dark rooms, embroidering until their fingers are raw, or on their website abigailswoboda.com.