Free Zombies: More Recent Dead by Paula Guran Page A

no pattern that she can discern, and she’s really good at that stuff.
    When Miss Mailer teaches, the day is full of amazing things. Sometimes she’ll read poems aloud, or bring her flute and play it, or show the children pictures out of a book and tell them stories about the people in the pictures. That was how Melanie got to find out about Agamemnon and the Trojan War, because one of the paintings showed Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, looking really mad and scary. “Why is she so mad?” Anne asked Miss Mailer.
    “Because Agamemnon killed their daughter,” Miss Mailer said. “The Greek fleet was stuck in harbor on the island of Aulis. So Agamemnon put his daughter on an altar, and he killed her so that the goddess Artemis would give the Greek fleet fair winds and help them to get to the war on time.”
    The kids in the class were mostly both scared and delighted with this, like it was a ghost story or something, but Melanie was troubled by it. How could killing a little girl change the way the winds blew? “You’re right, Melanie, it couldn’t,” Miss Mailer said. “But the Ancient Greeks had a lot of gods, and all kinds of weird ideas about what would make the gods happy. So Agamemnon gave Iphigenia’s death to the goddess as a present, and his wife decided he had to pay for that.” Melanie, who already knew by this time that her own name was Greek, decided she was on Clytemnestra’s side. Maybe it was important to get to the war on time, but you shouldn’t kill kids to do it. You should just row harder, or put more sails up. Or maybe you should go in a boat that had an outboard motor.
    The only problem with the days when Miss Mailer teaches is that the time goes by too quickly. Every second is so precious to Melanie that she doesn’t even blink: she just sits there wide-eyed, drinking in everything that Miss Mailer says, and memorizing it so that she can play it back to herself later, in her cell. And whenever she can manage it, she asks Miss Mailer questions, because what she likes most to hear, and to remember, is Miss Mailer’s voice saying her name, Melanie, in that way that makes her feel like the most important person in the world.
    One day, Sergeant comes into the classroom on a Miss Mailer day.
    Melanie doesn’t know he’s there until he speaks, because he’s standing right at the back of the class. When Miss Mailer says, “ . . . and this time, Pooh and Piglet counted three sets of footprints in the snow,” Sergeant’s voice breaks in with, “What the fuck is this?”
    Miss Mailer stops, and looks round. “I’m reading the children a story, Sergeant Robertson,” she says.
    “I can see that,” Sergeant’s voice says. “I thought the idea was to educate them, not give them a cabaret.”
    “Stories can educate just as much as facts,” Miss Mailer says.
    “Like how, exactly?” Sergeant asks, nastily.
    “They teach us how to live, and how to think.”
    “Oh yeah, plenty of world-class ideas in
Winnie-the-Pooh.
” Sergeant is using sarcasm. Melanie knows how sarcasm works: you say the opposite of what you really mean. “Seriously, Gwen, you’re wasting your time. You want to tell them stories, tell them about Jack the Ripper and John Wayne Gacy.”
    “They’re children,” Miss Mailer points out.
    “No, they’re not,” Sergeant says, very loudly. “And that, that right there, that’s why you don’t want to read them
Winnie-the-Pooh.
You do that, you start thinking of them as real kids. And then you slip up. And maybe you untie one of them because she needs a cuddle or something. And I don’t need to tell you what happens after that.”
    Sergeant comes out to the front of the class then, and he does something really horrible. He rolls up his sleeve, all the way to the elbow, and he holds his bare forearm in front of Kenny’s face: right in front of Kenny, just an inch or so away from him. Nothing happens at first, but then Sergeant spits on his hand and rubs at his