the inferno

Tucked at the far end of the school campus, there sat a solitary building—a small cinderblock square, its walls painted asylum white. Through its windows you could see at one end other buildings and the woods at the other. Crowded by a stand of blue elders and the wildfire-loving eucalyptus, the lone room sat in perpetual shadow of never-falling leaves, abundant boughs that absorbed all the sun and left little light behind for the small building.

The school appointed this the classroom of the bright-eyed young algebra teacher, pleased in the comfort of his unchanging mathematical systems, prim in his neat collared shirt and striped tie. The room eccentrically furnished, the young teacher made do with creaking one-arm desks, the sort that seemed to want to compress you, enforce a rigid spinal posture and disbar excessive movement. He made do with the ancient chalkboard imported from another classroom, the dust of long-gone lessons lingering in the air, mingling with the dust motes of timeworn tabletops.

Every day, the teacher lovingly doted on the room. He stayed late, working long after the end of the schoolday, coming to think of the room as a sort of home. He stared at the blank, white brick walls after grading quizzes and tests. Before leaving for the night, he emptied the day’s waste in the dumpster, quietly walking the bins back to the room, placing them in their corners. Most evenings, as he prepared to leave, he noticed one final piece of trash he had overlooked— the spare cup a student, endearingly absent-minded, left behind, half-full of water. He poured the remaining water outside in the nook beside the building’s foundation.

It was in this same spot that another student of his, endearing miscreant, routinely spat out his cinnamon gum, a brainy mass ground into the dirt by the water poured from the spare cup. The teacher, usually observant, neglected to notice the sapling that sprouted from this small daily act. Slowly, a red gum tree spread upward, its arms splayed in praise, its leaves creeping evermore along the walls and windows.

One evening years later, the old teacher sat in the classroom, yawning after another day’s lessons, grading, steady acts of guidance. He looked out the window at his glimpse of the woods only to find it utterly obscured. Red flowers now surrounded the window and closed in on him, their branches an infernal ochre, breaking through the window, reaching like flames, curling round his ever-shrinking, aging frame. The red gum tree pulled him close and whispered, “You gave me life—now you must change your life.” In a vast, horrifying hug, the tree enwrapped the building, releasing the teacher beside it, crushing its many cinderblocks into an ashen paste.

The old teacher retired from the school shortly thereafter. In meetings with administration, he could not explain the tree or the suddenly vanished building only he had taught in for many years. The red gum tree remained. No one knew what to make of its enormous majesty. But with the old teacher gone, the tree went unwatered. So some time after the old teacher left, the great, terrific tree shrunk and coiled out of sight.

In dying, the tree opened up a new plot of land for the school to build on, its dirt construed an inexplicable cinnamon hue. They planted a new small building in its place, painted its walls a more inviting eggshell, filled it with less creaky desks, and hung gleaming, resplendent whiteboards. They assigned the room to a new, less bright-eyed literature teacher, for whom no system was complete or perfect.

Arriving at the door with her bags full of books and games and supplies, she knelt in the odd dirt, sweeping her hand across its scarlet dust. She pressed her palm against the earth, which felt hot where the roots of the red gum tree had once been. She knew the work ahead would tire her, consume her, but fulfill her and yes, educate her. Looking to the distant woods—their mystery—then to the building before her, she rose and kicked a red cloud of dirt into the air. She could not explain it or answer why, but as she stood, she declared, “O, my classroom—my Inferno!” So the little building was named. . . and still stands!