She didn't understand any of it

The wind was cold. The feeling was icy blue with brown specks. Anything that is cold is not love. Love is warm. Love is Grandma.

Love is being committed to the ground.

The glimmer of the metal casket in the streak of sun momentarily superseded the gray of the day. The casket was in the hands of the men who had come to do a terrible thing. They had lifted the casket and were beginning to lower it. Inch by inch, moment by moment, they were pushing her grandmother down deep, more deep into the earth. They were burying love.

Everyone was weeping now, but still Sybil's eyes were dry, dry as the barren world that stretched before her, a world in which nobody said, "Sybil, Sybil, Sybil," a world without anyone to listen when she tried to talk, a world without love.

Propelled by powerful feelings, galvanized into locomotion, Sybil found herself moving forward. It was one or two slow steps at first, but then there were more steps, faster steps toward the banks of flowers over the lowered casket. She was at the grave, her body poised to jump into it, to join her grandmother forever.

Then there was that hand grabbing her arm with a swift, sharp movement. The restraining hand was pulling her, dragging her away from the grave, away from her grandmother.

The wind howled. The sky grew dark. There was nothing.

That hand with its overwhelming force was still pulling her. Its pressure was deeply embedded in her flesh. Her arm ached with the soreness engendered by the sharp, jerky movement.

Sybil turned to see who it was who had so forcibly removed her from her grandmother. Was it her uncle Roger, her father? They were not there.

There was no grave. There were no banks of flowers. No wind. No sky. Daddy and Mother, Uncle Roger and Aunt Hattie, Aunt Clara and the rich old man she married, the minister, all those other people were not here.

Instead of a grave there was a desk. The banks of flowers were blackboards. Instead of a sky there was a ceiling. Instead of a minister there was a teacher.

The teacher, who talked quickly in short nervous sentences, was tall and thin. She wasn't Sybil's teacher. Miss Thurston, her teacher, spoke slowly and deliberately and was stout and of medium height. The third-grade teacher was Miss Thurston. This should be Miss Thurston, but it was Miss Henderson. Sybil knew Miss Henderson as the fifth-grade teacher. What has happened? Sybil wondered. It was no dream. The room, a regular classroom in the school she had attended since kindergarten, seemed normal between its four walls. Only it wasn't her classroom. The windows of the room faced the east, not the west, as they did in the third-grade classroom. She knew all the rooms in the school, and this, she knew, was the fifth-grade classroom.

Somehow she had gotten into this fifth-grade classroom. She had done something wrong, a terrible thing. She had to get out, had to get back to the third grade where she belonged, where Miss Thurston had probably marked her absent. She had to apologize to Miss Henderson for being here, had to explain to Miss Thurston for not being there. But what was the explanation?

Then she began to notice the other children. There was Betsy Bush across the aisle, Henry Von Hoffman in front of her, Stanley, and Stuart and Jim and Carolyn Schultz and all the rest. Well, she thought, the whole third grade is in here.

Most of these children had started with her in kindergarten, and she knew them well. They were the same children, yet they were not the same as when she had seen them last. They were dressed differently from when they were in the third grade. They looked bigger than they had been before she left for her grandmother's funeral. How could that be? How could all these children get bigger in a moment?

Betsy Bush, assured and confident as always, was waving her hand as usual to answer the teacher's question. She acted as if she belonged here. All the other children did, too. None of them seemed to think there was anything wrong about being here. Why should Betsy be answering questions when Miss Henderson was not her teacher?

Sybil's eyes turned next to the page of the notebook open on her desk. She thought of concentrating on the page and forgetting all the nonsense. But it could not be done, for the page made no sense to her, and in her present state of mind the notebook only induced more terror. There were lots of notes, but she hadn't taken them. There was completed homework, which she hadn't done, but she noted that the homework was consistently graded A. However urgently she forced herself to minimize the meaning of all this, the more terrified she became.

She tried hard to shut her eyes to this teacher who wasn't hers, to this classroom with the windows on the wrong side, these children, blown up beyond their normal size and dressed in strange clothes they hadn't worn before. It didn't work.

Sybil began to feel a strange compulsion to examine herself. were her clothes "different"? Was she bigger, too? Her eye descended to her own dress. It was of yellow voile with green and purple embroidery, as totally unfamiliar as those of the other children. She hadn't owned it, didn't remember her mother's buying it for her, hadn't worn it before, and hadn't put it on this morning. She was wearing a dress that didn't belong to her in a classroom in which she didn't belong.

Nobody seemed to think that anything unusual was happening. The third-grade children kept on answering questions about things she'd never studied with them. She didn't understand any of it.

Sybil
Flora Rheta Schreiber