Удушье (Choke)

I say, ask your teacher.

Every half hour, I'm supposed to teach another herd of fourth-graders some shit nobody wants to learn, like how to start a fire. How to carve an apple-head doll. How to make ink out of black walnuts. As if this is going to get any of them into a good college.

Besides deforming the poor chickens, these fourth-graders, they all walk in here carrying some germ. It's no mystery why Denny's always wiping his nose and coughing. Head lice, pin-worms, chlamydia, ringworm—for serious, these field trip kids are the pint-sized horsemen of the apocalypse.

Instead of useful Pilgrim crap, I tell them how their play­ground game ring-around-a-rosy is based on the bubonic plague of 1665. The Black Death gave people hard, swollen, black spots they called 'plague roses,' or buboes, surrounded by a pale ring. Hence 'bubonic.' Infected people were locked inside their houses to die. In six months, a hundred thousand people were buried in the huge mass graves.

The 'pocket full of posies' was what people of London car­ried so they wouldn't smell the corpses.

To build a fire, all you do is pile up some sticks and dry grass. You strike a spark with a flint. You work the bellows. Don't think for a second this fire-starting routine makes their little eyes sparkle. Nobody's impressed by a spark. Kids crouch in the front row, huddling over their little video games. Kids yawn right in your face. All of them giggle and pinch, rolling their eyes at me in my breeches and dirty shirt.

Instead, I tell them how in 1672, the Black Plague hit Naples, Italy, killing some four hundred thousand people.

In 1711, in the Holy Roman Empire, the Black Plague killed five hundred thousand people. In 1781, millions died worldwide from the flu. In 1792, another plague killed eight hundred thou­sand people in Egypt. In 1793, mosquitoes spread yellow fever to Philadelphia, where it killed thousands.

One kid in the back whispers, 'This is worse than the spin­ning wheel.'

Other kids open their box lunches and look inside their sand­wiches.

Outside the window, Denny's bent over in the stocks. This time just out of habit. The town council has announced he'll be banished right after lunch. The stocks are just where he feels most safe from himself. Nothing's locked or even closed, but he's bent over with his hands and neck where they've been for months.

On their way here from the weaver's, one kid was poking a stick in Denny's nose and then trying to poke the stick in his mouth. Other kids rub his shaved head for luck.

Starting the fire only kills about fifteen minutes, so after that I'm supposed to show each herd of kids the big cooking pots and twig brooms and bed warmers and shit.

Children always look bigger in a room with a six-foot ceiling. A kid in the back says, 'They gave us fucking egg salad again.'

Here in the eighteenth century, I'm sitting beside the hearth of the big open fireplace equipped with the regular torture cham­ber relics, the big iron pothooks, the pokers, andirons, branding irons. My big fire blazing. This is a perfect moment to take the iron pincers out of the coals and pretend to study their pitted white-hot points. All the kids step back.

And I ask them, hey kids, can anybody here tell me how people in the eighteenth century used to abuse naked little boys to death.

This always gets their attention.

No hands go up.

Still studying the pincers, I say, 'Anybody?'

Still no hands.

'For real,' I say and start working the hot pincers open and shut. 'Your teacher must've told you about how they used to kill little boys back then.'

Their teacher's outside, waiting. How it worked was, a couple hours ago, while her class was carding wool, this teacher and me wasted some sperm in the smokehouse, and for sure she thought it would turn into something romantic, but hey. Me being face deep in her wonderful rubbery butt, it's amazing what a woman will read into it if you by accident say, I love you.

Ten times out of ten, a guy means I love this.

You wear a foofy linen shirt, a cravat, and some breeches, and the whole world wants to sit