I Ate This When I Was a Child Winner of the G.B. Crump Prize for Experimental Fiction

I'm trying to teach my creative writing students the difference between past and present tense. "A flashback scene," I tell them, "shows something that already happened, so it's in past tense." They nod. "It needs to be clear when things happen in relation to other things," I say, and they nod again. "Like, you graduated from high school, and now you're currently in college. Get it?" They nod. "The current action of your story can be in past tense, too," I say. "But the past is always the past. Does that make sense? Is that clear?" They say it is most definitely clear and they have no questions at all.

But then a little girl with braids shows up on Thursday and takes Ashley's seat.

"Ashley," I say. "How old are you?"

"I'm twelve," she says. "When I'm twelve, I went to the beach with my family and my father has an affair with a boy lifeguard. It kind of messes things up for a while, but we got over it."

"We will get over it," I correct. "Also, you're switching tenses in the same sentence!"

"My mother marries a fireman," she says.

"She will marry a fireman," I say. "Or she married a fireman. Depending on if you're talking about what will happen in your future, or what already happened to the college-aged Ashley who usually sits here."

"I'm twelve," says Ashley.

The other students are grumbling. I can't blame them. I was ready to move on from tenses and talk about the importance of concrete detail. But I see we have more work to do.

_______

Maybe it's because we live in Mississippi, and the seasons are slippery: fall and spring, who can tell the difference? Summer oozes into autumn, and then it's winter for a week, and then it's spring again, then summer, and the years keep going by like this. Also, the past is everywhere. There are old-timey cars toodling around town, some lower to the ground than modern cars and some higher. There are brick buildings on Main Street that have been there for decades. There are people with Confederate flag bumper stickers, people who believe the dumb things their dumb relatives say about people different from themselves. But also, there are people who disagree with these people, and they all stand up in alderman meetings and yell at each other. It's like a wrestling match between the past and the future. I saw a drone the other day, hovering through the neighborhood with a package. You can have a drone deliver your Confederate flag. It's very confusing.

"How long have we been married?" I ask my husband, because I really don't know.

"It seems like just yesterday," he says. "But it also seems like a million years."

That's not very helpful. I try to do the math. I try to think of what we'd planned to do and what we did do, and what we didn't, and what we will do later. We didn't have children, so we don't have any. "I'd like to go to Ireland," I tell my husband, and he says, "That sounds like something we would do." "Will do," I correct, and he says, "That's what I meant."

_______

On Tuesday, a douchy frat boy with sporadic attendance shows up looking about thirty five, wearing a football jersey. His neck is twice the size it was on Thursday. "I'm ready to retire after a stellar career," he announces. "And just do commercials and date models."

I try to make this a teaching moment. "So the Josh who is usually here will become a football player," I say. "And will become famous."

He nods.

"Except you won't," I can't stop myself from saying. "Not with your grades. And you don't even play football! You're not giving yourself a believable trajectory, and so why should we trust you...