Litter-Bugs
by Liesl Jobson
After Lerato's funeral, Grace saw the world from a peculiar angle. The doctor diagnosed labyrinthitis. If she tilted her ear 45 degrees to her shoulder, then the pews inside the chapel at Christ the King Elementary were nearly level and the stained glass windows rose almost perpendicular. But when she sat back from the kneeler after praying, the dark interior pitched about her and she wanted to be sick.
She touched the walls as she walked along the corridors and held tightly to the banisters in the stairwell. When she looked down at the reading rug next to the puzzle rack, her eyes pooled and swam on the spot where she'd last held Lerato.
A week earlier Grace had written on the board, 'King's kids are not litter-bugs'. The chalk squeaked and snapped in her hand. "Nobody gets lunch until that messy playground is tidy," she said. "It was in a terrible state after recess. Come back for your lunch boxes when you've picked up the rubbish." The bell rang and children raced barefoot past the chapel to pick chip packets and sweet papers off the grass.
Lerato clutched the curved garbage bin and flung a lollypop wrapper over the edge. She let out a small fluttery cry, jumping backwards on the grass, then ran, wheezing, to show her teacher the black stinger left in her palm. Grace was about to remove it with a deft scrape of her fingernail, when Lerato crumpled and fell to the ground.
"Thato, you must run for Sister Mary-Paul," said Grace to Lerato's twin brother who tagged along as she carried the limp child back to the classroom. "Run please Thato," she urged, laying Lerato on the reading rug beside the puzzle rack. The boy gasped in sympathy, staring as his sister's lips turned blue and she stopped breathing, as if he already knew that neither Sister Mary-Paul nor an ambulance could arrive in time.
The grade ones were returning for their lunch boxes. "I picked up twenty papers, Ma'am," said Refilwe. "We got no litter-bugs anymore."
"Can we eat now?" asked James, shaking his sandwiches.
"Why's Lerato sleeping Ma'am?" lisped Liza through the gap in her teeth.
"School is not for sleepyheads," said James, mimicking his teacher's inflection.
Jojo popped the straw into her juice carton and said to Thato, "Your Mama won't be pleased."
Liesl Jobson is a South African musician and writer whose recent work appears/is forthcoming in South African journals Chimurenga, New Coin, Carapace, Kotaz and Fidelities, and internationally in Ghoti, Unlikely Stories, InkPot, elimae, Noö Journal, and Opium. She won the POWA Women's Writing Poetry Competion 2005 and was a finalist in the HSBC/SA PEN Award 2005. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2005 and is a poetry editor at Mad Hatters' Review.