"Twenty Eyes"
“Jane!”
“Oh, Henry!” she moaned his name.
___
Too expensive Old Principal Spalding thought as he noisily shut the oven door and took out his freshly baked brownies. At those prices, getting my prescription would be cheaper, he thought glumly. Still he wouldn’t be able to take it, it addled his heart condition, grass was safer.
__
The morning hadn’t gone well for Jane Sicamour. Her cell phone had dropped from her flimsy skirt pocket into the toilet drowning all of her friends and family in an instant. Hundreds wiped out.
It can be replaced… somehow, she thought as the wind whooshed her skirt as she ran out the door. She stumbled in heels through the gravel drive to her bright red car.
Getting in she snagged the hem of her skirt in the door. The flimsy material ripped turning her orange flowered slightly below the knee skirt into a flouncy mini skirt. Cursing the lack of time she went with the new look and headed down the road in her car.
Her morning took her to the grocers; she popped in and grumbled through the aisles until she saw what she wanted. I’ll never hear from him now, she mourned. She had invested two Saturdays of the past month dating a man, and now after a month’s absence she knew he was the one!
He hasn’t called me in a month; she fretted biting her fake nails. She grabbed the tinned lunch she wanted and made her way out; she had to teach kindergarten in twenty minutes.
She didn’t know why she chose Kindergarten; she expected it was the cute happy faces of all those adorable kids she saw the day she visited as a student teacher. She hoped to have children like this with Henry someday. Stopping in the teacher’s lounge, she grabbed a brownie from the tray sitting out.
Going through the songs and lessons that morning, she felt depressed. He wouldn’t be able to call her; did he even want to call her?
As she finished the last song before lunch she looked up; standing in the doorway was a dark silhouette. The bell rang signalling the students to leave for lunch.
They were alone.
She gasped. “Henry!”
“Susan-er...Jane!” he called to her. She leapt to his side and within seconds they were in each other’s arms. “Oh Henry…I’ve missed you, let’s go, let’s run away together like we promised, right now!”
“Oh Jane, whatever you say darling” He kissed her passionately over and over again. The heat from their bodies burst through their clothes. Jane’s head whirled in the heavens, she never wanted this moment to end and it didn’t until she looked over Henry’s shoulder and saw twenty pairs of small eyes watching her curiously.
Jane panicked, she had forgotten; the schedule had changed, Kindergarten lunch wasn’t for another fifteen minutes!
“Oh, Henry” she gasped at her error. She turned back to his tall silhouette and froze.
Henry wasn’t Henry anymore.
Standing in her arms was small Old Principal Spalding. The florescent light gleamed on his bald spot and white hair. Through his glasses his eyes looked funny. The brownies had been the wrong ones he thought guiltily. $600 wasted…
The children sat quietly.
There were vacancies in the staff for the rest of the year.
-Brooke©2010
