2019 fiction alum Candace Walsh was recently featured in Passengers. Read an excerpt of Walsh’s story “Christians and Poets” below:
Christians and Poets
Dear Mrs. Gunderson,
Please forgive the tardiness of my reply to your letter sent twenty-three years ago. I re-encountered it while going through my mother’s bedside table drawer. I emptied her walk-in closet in under an hour. The women’s shelter volunteer comes tomorrow to pick up six big black garbage bag sachets wafting tea rose and Comet.
Leave it to a little wicker drawer of ephemera to slow my progress. Birthday cards from her mother. My sparse stack of letters from college. And then an envelope you once asked her to give me: a scalloped leaf of stationery folded over photocopied poems framed by dark toner, cleft down the middle by the gutter’s shadow. I remember reading the note, skimming the poems, and leaving the mess on her kitchen counter.
*
You were my first and second grade teacher, and I loved you so much the thought of summer recess[1] made me recoil. When I told my mother, she said I wanted to be your pet, a term that pricked warm at my spine. She didn’t seem to worry about what it meant that I’d imprinted on a short-haired woman who parted seas of children with a no-nonsense stride.
You had an office off the classroom with a glossy wooden paddle on the wall, Bible verse posters, shelves of books, and a Mason jar of dried chickpeas. When I’d turn the jar, they’d tumble, rattle. They looked like little butts. I knew better than to point that out as I helped you staple handouts.
In class, you’d sometimes talk about your sons Ernest and Lawrence with a deep fondness that made me sad. I fantasized about being Ernest or Lawrence, I didn’t care which. I wanted to be your child, even if it meant being a boy.
Do you remember that day in second grade when I came up to you, hand outstretched with the cluster of flowers I’d picked for you during recess? Their milk dribbled out of the downy stems and into my palms.
You told me dandelions were weeds and I should throw them out. My belly felt like the freshly-emptied trash in which I dropped the scraggly blooms. Were you also meaning to discourage me from wooing you with flowers? Back at my desk, the dandelion milk on my palms dried as brown splotches. Proof of my cumbersome sun-shot fealty.
[1] 1. the action of receding; 2. a hidden, secret, or secluded place or part; 3. an indentation, cleft; 4. a suspension of business or procedure often for rest or relaxation (Merriam-Webster)
Read this story in its entirety here: https://www.passengersjournal.com/volume-3-issue-1-prose/#walsh
