Words That Start With The Letter D

By: Patrick Green
September 10, 2008

Perhaps ‘D’ wasn’t the best choice for today’s letter.

Mrs. Pivens nearly bit her lip as she waited for Oliver to spell it out: “D-E-A-D. Just like Janet.”

But Oliver only stared, finally shrugging his... ‘disinterest’. That was a good one.

Rather than give another of her students the opportunity to speak the word that would bury the students deeper still in their morose morass, Mrs. Pivens turned to the blackboard, thought a moment, and came up with a suitable alternate- ‘daylight’.

As she spelled the word, that word which so contradicted a day as gloomy as the demeanor of the twenty-odd five year olds behind her, Mrs. Pivens found herself shrinking from the small eyes she felt staring, stabbing into her back, perhaps searching for reason where they’d never had cause to search before.

“Who knows this word?”

The little eyes simply stared from sad, sleepless sockets, unblinking.

“Remember, the ‘gh’ is silent.”

This triggered nothing. Sweet little Tammy, who always raised a hand and a smile, now offered only a muted cough. Some of the others quickly turned toward the sound, as if accusing the girl of breaking some secret code of silence, but their faces remained blank.

Mrs. Pivens rolled the chalk between her fingers, waiting, willing the word to come back to her from among the neat rows. She took a step forward, grasping the chalk firmly, as she did her little can of tear gas when walking through the mall parking garage.

“Janet loved to learn. And I know all of you do too. Let’s keep learning, just like she’d want, okay?”

Nothing.
Mrs. Pivens went to her desk and wheeled her chair out in front of it.

“Who wants to talk? About Janet, or anything else.”

Little faces, once sweet but now sour with a sudden bitter wisdom, seemed to judge her.

“We’re going to be dead too. Like Janet,” said Leah in a raspy monotone.

Not ‘die’. ‘Be dead’. Why had she chosen these words?

“Not for a long time,” Mrs. Pivens assured.

“How do you know?” asked Benny Taylor.

And how could she honestly answer that? This was a can of worms that should never have been opened. And with the onset of Janet’s sudden and completely unidentified ailment, how could she? The school was barely at forty percent capacity, thanks to alarmed parents and teachers. Mrs. Pivens had herself debated, but ultimately, her fear of losing her job after last month’s messy and very public divorce motivated her to show up despite her misgivings.

Finding her classroom nearly full this morning was at first a pleasant flattering surprise. But instead of brave and eager little souls determined to carry on without their classmate, she was greeted with this- a roomful of newborn cynics.