Strange Pulp 5: Ms. Quick Wouldn't Die

Behold—the fifth issue of Strange Pulp, your very own irregular journal of weird fiction! If you missed any of our first four issues, catch up here.

Today’s story takes place during the week of December 19, 2022. In fact, it reaches its thrilling climax on the very day this newsletter was released. That makes it a holiday story, after a fashion, and one I hope you will very much enjoy. If you like it a bit, hit like or comment. If you like it a lot, back me on Patreon so that I can keep making these things without casting my family into the workhouse. And always remember to—

Read Issue 5 In ePub / PDF

Content Warning 

Elly Quick had been alive forever.

As far as she could tell.

A white woman with a drawn face, bony hands and hair so blonde it nearly disappeared, she had clear memories back to around 1900. Before that, things were hazier. She had no recollection of childhood, of parents, but she had a clear image of holding someone’s hand and watching sharply-dressed soldiers marching to war. It could have been the Civil War. It could have been the Revolutionary. It had been many decades since she wanted to know.

Her apparent age varied from thirty-five to sixty-five, depending on the time of year. Occasionally, she became sick. Influenza in 1919. Polio in 1934. A cancer that appeared in 1972 and lingered painfully for two years, bringing her to the brink of what she assumed was death before fading away. There was a fire in her—she liked to picture a little campfire flickering in her belly—that sustained her where others failed. Sometimes it flickered but it simply never went out.

And so she was immortal.

She understood that this was remarkable, but she rarely thought about it. It was like socks, you understand. Once they are protecting you, it’s so easy to forget that they’re there.

It was the children who kept her going. She’d been teaching in the village of Deepkill, New York, for as long as anyone could remember. She’d worked in one-room school houses and private homes, taught algebra at the old high school and art in the middle school when the high school closed down. Since 1997 she’d been a senior teacher at Little Sunrise Daycare, a modest operation on Peony Street that offered supervision and instruction for children aged two to five. She taught the older students, most of whom were moving on to kindergarten after spring.

She would miss them deeply.

They would not miss her.

For that was the secret to Elly’s unchanging life, her ability to live openly in a small town without ever changing her appearance or name. Nearly everyone in Deepkill had some experience with Ms. Quick—either as a student or a parent or, in many cases, both. For a year or more, she had been the most important person in their life. A figure of warmth and understanding, compassion and hidden knowledge. They had loved her with the boundless, naive affection only found in people too young to tie their shoes. But when they left her classroom she faded from their minds.

This was how a parent like Phillip Bass could introduce himself on his daughter’s first day without knowing that Elly taught him the alphabet. Why her boss, Davida Gross, could treat her as a subordinate even though Elly had changed her urine-soaked underwear nearly every day from 1997 to ’98. Elly had given them everything and they remembered none of it. This did not bother her because the children gave her something too.

Life.

Elly arrived for each school year stooped and wrinkled, sniffling and sleep-deprived, with aches in her wrists and knees and back and skull. By summer she stood tall. Her skin was taut and her eyes sparkled and her laugh rang like the bells at St. Joe’s. What mechanism made this possible? Was it biological, supernatural, spiritual? She’d quit wondering long ago. All she knew is that they kept her alive. Perhaps this made sense. Children have life to spare.

If it were up to her, she would have kept on like this forever, old in autumn, young in spring. She’d have read to them and sung to them, taught them to count in English and Spanish and Mandarin. She’d have tended their booboos and bandaged their cuts and soothed them when they were inexplicably sad. She could imagine nothing more like heaven than to spend eternity holding an endless succession of tiny hands.

But Covid spoiled everything.

Little Sunrise shut down along with the rest of the country. For five long months, Elly was cut off from her children. When the school reopened, she was weaker than she had been in decades. Over the next two years, outbreaks and masks and closures and digital learning made it impossible to find her rhythm. Youth eluded her. Her body broke down. The children grated. Work became a chore. She began to wonder what it would be like to die.

On December 19, 2022, Elly was on what her younger colleagues called “the struggle bus.” She’d pinched a nerve in her neck. Moving her head caused her to seize in pain and raising her arm was impossible. She was sleeping poorly and had nothing good to read, her houseplants were wilting and a neighborhood cat had taken to defecating on her welcome mat. Winter break was five long days away. Not half days, either. Full days! So when her alarm went off, Elly was already awake. She trudged down a sidewalk sodden with decaying leaves and tried to ignore the ache in her leg that sprung up when she climbed the steps to school. She needed the children to give her an easy morning.

They did not.

It was like a little demon was hopping from child to child. D.J. LeDonne threw a shoe at Tara Starbuck, who cried for twelve straight minutes then soothed herself by pinching Percy Goldfield’s fat little ears. Percy spent a while whining about how “Tawa is being mean to me,” but when Elly tried to comfort him he wandered off to kick Laura Creek’s block tower. Laura poked Jeanie Schaster who spit at Glenn Kaplan who shoved Kathy Smythe who sent Jeff Cheltenham into hysterics by calling him a noob—the worst insult these children could devise.

The day went on like that, crisis spiraling into crisis. Nothing Elly did could stop the tailspin. It should have rolled off her, but her neck was in agony and the armor that protected her heart from the children’s cruelties was cracked. She wasted hours trying not to scream.

Four times she reached her breaking point, when her only recourse was to stare out the window at her favorite tree—a towering maple that she liked to imagine was planted the day she was born. Even this late in autumn, a few limp yellow leaves still clung to its branches. Their persistence gave her strength.

She told herself Tuesday would be better, but it was just as bad. Phillip Howe decided it was amusing to answer every question by saying, “Meep!” The other children imitated him. The day was lost.

Wednesday was worse. Her neck didn’t heal and her sleep didn’t improve. Her fern turned black, the neighborhood cat smeared wet feces all over her stoop, and the intervals between the children’s highs and lows grew shorter than a hangnail.

By Thursday, Elly felt like a railroad spike had been driven through the top of her spine. Her classroom a wreckage of books and toys and she was certain the walls were creeping in. All of the children were sniffling—half from frustration, the rest from a cold that should have kept them home. She looked to her maple for support but hard rain had stripped off every leaf.

She was in the corner of the room, crouched on a small plastic chair, trying to answer an incoherent text message from a parent—“Tara on lunches Tuesday, okay?”—when Tyson Garber wet his pants and Naomi Paumgarten leapt on the table and screamed, “Disgusting! Disgusting! Gross!”

Elly got Tyson cleaned and changed, forced Naomi to apologize and found a way to respond to the text that she hoped would end the exchange. She was on her knees, sopping up urine, when a little hand prodded her in the spine. She closed her eyes, pain dancing from forehead to shoulders like lightning on a Jacob’s ladder. The little hand prodded her again.

“Ms. Quick?”

It was Becky Lilith-Black, a precocious four-and-a-half year old with bouncy black curls and a voice that hit her nerves like lemon juice on a cut. Elly was used to unpleasant children—it was part of the job—but she’d never met one as vicious as Becky Lilith-Black. She was whiny and cruel, a tattletale and an excellent liar, always stealing treats and blaming it on her supposed friends. Confronted with any wrongdoing, she would explode into tears, screaming loud enough to crack glass until, more often than not, her victim apologized to her.

She poked Elly again. Elly tried to breathe. Jason Gersen laughed the way he did when he’d done something mean. Another round of crying began.

“Ms. Quick?”

“Yes?”

Elly opened her eyes. Becky jammed a paper in Elly’s face.

“I drew a Minecraft.”

“Wonderful.”

Somewhere in the room, paper ripped. Andy Suk moaned—“This won’t work! Why won’t this work?!” Becky shoved the paper so close to Elly’s face that her eyes crossed.

“Do you like it?”

“Hold on.”

Elly pressed the paper towel harder into the rug. This was stubborn pee.

“Ms. Quick, I asked you a question.”

“I know. Just—“

She heard a smack. More screams. More laughter. More tears. Several children said, “Meep!”

“Ms. Quick!”

“Becky, please—“

Elly tried to stand up. Becky dragged her down. Elly landed awkwardly. Her neck went crunch.

“Ms. Quuuuuuuuuuick!”

“What?”

“Do you like my picture!”

“No!”

Every child froze. Every child stared at her. Every child heard what happened next.

“Why not?” said Becky, cheeks reddening, eyes already wet.

“Because it’s stupid.”

“What?”

“Minecraft is stupid, Becky. Your picture is stupid, too.”

There was quiet. After an explosion, there usually is. The pain in Elly’s neck eased. She almost felt pleased with herself. And then the entire room exploded in tears.

Elly retreated to the corner and stared at her naked maple. She had nothing left.

That night she opened a bottle of Cabernet and a bag of peanut M&Ms, lit every candle she owned, and dumped a pound of Epsom salts into the tub. The pain in her neck was too high for the bath to reach, but the wine did its part and the candy helped too.

One day left.

And then a week off.

Trying to forget how short that week would be, she stared at the painting beside her medicine cabinet. It showed a village perched on the side of a mountain, cozy little houses lined up in colorful rows, faces smiling in the windows. It had been in her bathroom for seventy years, maybe more. She’d always assumed it was a drawing of the Alps, but as the steam cleared she noticed a hulking white monster peering around the house in the top right corner, smiling like he wanted to play.

A yeti.

How had she never noticed that before?

“I wonder if yeti are real,” she told no one. (She’d stopped feeling self-conscious about talking to herself during the 1910s. “Of course they’re not, obviously they’re not, but you have to think—if there’s such a thing as immortal school teachers, why not yeti, too?”

She giggled about this as the water drained from the tub. She scrubbed her body with a towel, picturing herself scaling the Himalayas, ice ax in one hand, binoculars in the other, scanning the horizon for that most abominable snowman.

“You could spend a lifetime looking. Even if you never found one—and really, of course you wouldn’t find one—imagine the things you would see.”

But as she hung her towel on its hook, she remembered that she’d never been to Asia. Never left North America. Never been anywhere more exotic than—

Buffalo.

Albany.

Rochester, twice.

Toronto, once.

Manhattan, a handful of times—usually a matinee and a mediocre dinner and then back to the bus.

“And what else have I done?”

Nothing really. Nothing but help a few generations of brattish children grow into brattish adults so they could create little brats of their own. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d looked forward to, well, anything. She didn’t even like Christmas anymore. The lights made her eyes ache; the music turned her stomach.

She drained her glass and filled it again. She wandered into her bedroom, bathrobe cinched tight. The wood sucked the heat out of her feet. Even after she climbed into her bed, they stayed cold. She sifted through the stack of Rex Stout on her bedside table. Once she’d found one she was reasonably sure she hadn’t read that decade, she pressed it to her chest and sighed.

One day left.

She’d make it a good one. Wouldn’t let the children get on top of her. Wouldn’t lose her cool. After Christmas, she’d get back into her groove and everything would go back to being fine.

She’d just cracked the book when her phone pinged. A message from Davida Gross.

“Stick around 15 minutes tomorrow? Something to discuss.”

Elly closed her book. Rubbed her temples. Muttered: “Oh, hell.”

The meaning was transparent. Becky Lilith-Black told her parents what she’d said about her picture. Her parents complained. And now, because they were rich and white and angry—and because what she’d said to the girl was frankly unacceptable—she would be fired.

It wouldn’t be a catastrophe if she were feeling a little younger. She’d take a few months off. Keep her strength up with some tutoring, start a new job in the fall. But the way things were now, lord. She would have to start subbing again, living on scraps until a permanent position could be found. It was that or death.

This was going to be horrible. But she had no choice but to survive.

Elly read half a chapter and fell asleep. She awoke to find her neck free of pain.

That day, Friday, the last day, the children were angels. They’d spent all week decorating for a party—paper snowflakes and signs that read “Happy Holidays” in manic, five-year-old scrawl. Elly brought in a tray of supermarket cupcakes which she stashed on top of the bookshelf. She put on a playlist of 19th Century Christmas music—the sort she might have grown up with—and asked the children if they had any other artwork to hang. They all gave her something except for Becky Lilith-Black. Elly wanted to ask for her Minecraft drawing, to apologize for what she’d said, but raising the subject would only invite more tears. Better to let her forget.

Elly waited until just before pickup to deploy the cupcakes. For five minutes, there was no sound but the shuffle of chairs, the peeling of paper, the squelch of icing against plump cheeks. Elly sat beside them at their little table, enjoying the not-quite-silence for what she knew would be the last time.

When the children left, she emptied her desk. She’d brought an accordion folder for keepsakes but found nothing that deserved to be kept. She threw away a teaching certificate that had expired in 1945 and a class photo from ’84 in which she sported an easy smile and a ludicrous mountain of hair. The only thing she considered keeping was a 1973 get well note, signed by twenty-three children in cursive so precise it made her want to cry.

What ever happened to cursive, she wondered as she stuffed it into the trash. When did we get comfortable living in such a hideous world?

Davida was in her office, a converted storage room that she’d never quite managed to empty of junk. She pulled a box of paper towels off a chair and said something to Elly about making herself at home. Elly sat on the chair’s lip, back straight, a hunted animal waiting to bolt. She wanted this done.

Davida arranged her face into what was supposed to be a sympathetic expression.

“I was very surprised to learn—“

“Don’t,” said Elly.

It was funny, she thought, that after a century telling children not to interrupt she would break her own rules.

“Don’t what?” said Davida.

“I’m deeply sorry about what happened. More than that, I’m embarrassed. It was unprofessional and cruel and with the way her family supports the school, well—I understand that I can’t go on.”

Davida sipped her coffee. She was silent for long enough that Elly wondered if the meeting had finished without her noticing it. But finally Davida said:

“What are you talking about?”

“The incident with Becky Lilith-Black.”

“What incident would that be?”

Elly felt the world sliding out from beneath her feet.

“Her parents didn’t call you?” she said.

“Nope.”

“They didn’t force you to fire me?”

“No. But let’s hear what happened. Maybe I’ll fire you all by myself.”

Elly prized herself on choosing words carefully. Her long life had taught her a special patience. But for the second time that week, she felt her calm desert her. She blathered.

“It was Tuesday, Thursday—yesterday I mean—and we were doing art and the children were, well, and Becky had drawn this picture and she was poking me in the spine and my neck has been an absolute mess and—”

“Breathe, dear.”

“I called her picture stupid.”

Davida stared. Her eyes were deep brown, her brows plucked into a perfect half circle. Elly waited for her to scream.

Instead she laughed.

It hit her like an earthquake—a sudden explosion followed by tremors that took a full minute to dissipate. When she came out of it, she was asking Elly a question. She had to repeat it several times before Elly understood.

“Was it?” she said.

“Was it what?”

“The picture—was it stupid?”

“Oh, yes.” Elly forced out a laugh even though she felt no relief. “It was terrible. Something to do with Minecraft?”

That just made Davida laugh harder.

“Minecraft,” she said. “Minecraft is so fucking dumb.”

Elly shifted in her seat. It wasn’t the profanity that bothered her—it was the feeling that the universe was telling a joke at her expense.

“And her parents said nothing?”

“Their heads are so far up their ass, they wouldn’t notice if Becky literally came home on fire. You just chill right out, Elly. If they’ve got a problem, I’ll handle it. You’re one of my best teachers. It would take a lot more than one bad day to get you fired.”

This was good news.

The best news.

So why did Elly feel like she had a bellyful of concrete?

“So why did you call me in?” she said.

“Christ, I should have explained in the text. I didn’t mean to scare you. I just wanted to show you this.”

She slid a photograph across the desk. It was a class picture. Once again, Elly was in the back row. Her hair was smaller than it had been in the eighties but she wore the exact same smile. At the bottom, zebra-striped letters read, “1997.”

“Oh wow,” said Elly. Useless words that she felt were being pushed through her mouth by some unseen force.

“You know who was in that class?” said Davida.

Elly tapped a child in the front row. A skinny Black girl with a smile that looked like it might spill off her face.

“You were an excellent student,” said Elly. “Good with numbers. Loved to sing. You’d just learned to tie your shoes and you liked to help the other kids with theirs.”

“I also wet my pants like every other day.”

“I don’t recall.”

Another laugh. Gentler this time.

“I can’t believe I didn’t recognize my own teacher,” said Davida.

“It happens.”

“Why didn’t I know you’d been here for so long?”

“I’m shy about my age.”

Davida took Elly’s hand, a casual gesture that renewed her urge to run.

“So how are we gonna celebrate?”

“Celebrate what?”

“Your twenty-fifth year! That’s gotta be your, I don’t know, ruby anniversary or something.”

“Silver. I think.”

“Well you’re not getting silver. But we should party. Not some lousy classroom party with cupcakes and streamers and, yeesh. After Christmas we’re gonna have a real teacher’s night out. I pick the spot, I invite everybody. You just show up and have a good time.”

“I’m not the type.”

“Then we’ll come up with something else. Elly, I want you feeling appreciated. When someone’s been around a while, they tend to get taken for granted. I say fuck that. I want you to love it here. I want you to stay forever.”

Elly took back her hand.

She thought of the yeti peeking its head around the house, ready to romp through the snow.

A sentence came into her head. A short one. She examined it from every angle—like a child contemplating their first oyster.

Best to slurp it down.

“I quit.”

Davida sat back. She had the expression of someone who’d been hit with a brick.

“So we skip the party,” she said.

“It’s not that.”

“I could try to find money for a raise.”

“No, no. Thank you but—it’s me. Something I’ve been building to for a long time. Without the children I—maybe I’ll find something else to sustain myself. Maybe not. But I have to go.”

Davida’s lips squeezed tight. When she spoke, she sounded less like a friend, more like a boss.

“Effective when?”

“Now.”

“It’d be a lot easier on me if you stayed ‘till summer.

“I can’t. If I don’t leave now.... And anyway, I have travel plans.”

“Where to?”

“Tibet.”

“Shit. I can’t argue with Tibet.”

And that was how Elly Quick broke free.

She wasn’t really going to Tibet. Nobody actually goes to Tibet. But she was going to take a week off, dammit, and then she was going to find something new. She could teach painting to seniors or writing to convicts or English to immigrants. She could leave Deepkill altogether—find a new school in a new town. Whatever it was, it would be fresh. The next century of her life would be different from the last.

The front door closed behind her. The air was still damp, the sky grimy nickel. Elly took a breath that flowed right down to her heels. She wondered if there was anywhere on Main Street open for lunch.

“Ms. Quick?”

Becky Lilith-Black had her back pressed against the school. Her toggle coat was buttoned wrong and her hat was flopped halfway over her face. Her cheeks and fingers were strawberry red. She had a picture in her hand.

“Where’s your dad?” said Elly.

Becky pointed down the steps, where her father waited in his car. The windows were up. His face was as red as Becky’s and his hands were waving wildly. Fifty years ago I’d have assumed he was insane, thought Elly, but he’s probably just on the phone.

Elly crouched in front of Becky, who had a little goatee made of frosting and crumbs.

“Why did you wait for me?” she said.

“I had to give you this.”

Becky handed over the picture. Thankfully, it had nothing to do with Minecraft. It was three pressed leaves—yellow, red, brown—fanned out and laminated. Below, in a mix of capital and lowercase, Becky had written:

I love u Ms. Kwik.

Elly pressed the picture to her chest. Her eyes burned. Becky clapped her hands.

“Maple leaves,” Elly said.

“From the tree over there.”

“My favorite.”

“Yeah I know. You look at it, like, all the time. We got them...ohhhh, a day ago? Maybe Halloween? They’ve been getting flat in a big book at home. I thought this way, even though the leaves fell off your tree, you could have them all winter long. You like it?”

“It’s beautiful.”

“But do you like it?”

“Yes,” said Elly, laughing so that the tears would stay put. “I love it, Becky. And I’m very, very sorry for what I said yesterday. Minecraft isn’t stupid and neither was your picture.”

“I know.”

“It was a very mean thing of me to say.”

“I know that, too.”

“Now get in the car. It’s cold.”

“Okay. Bye bye.”

Becky spun away. Elly smeared her palm across her eyes. She wanted to say a proper farewell, but what else was there to say besides bye bye?

Still, she kept her eyes on Becky. Habit wouldn’t let her look away. So she saw that instead of walking down the stairs, Becky hopped, both feet squeezed together, from the top step to the next.

It was a dangerous thing to do. Something Elly had scolded the children for perhaps 2,000 times. She was about to repeat her well-worn warning when Becky hopped again.

Her left foot landed okay. Her right foot slipped. She tumbled, hands flying out in front of her.

Elly reached for her. She caught a fistful of yarn, tearing the beanie off Becky’s head and doing absolutely nothing to stop her fall.

Becky arced through the air. Her head smacked into the last step with a thump that made Elly think of a cabbage falling off the counter. She flopped onto her back. Her face was a mask of blood.

She did not scream.

The beanie fell from Elly’s hand. She scrambled down the stairs, muttering something that was halfway between obscenity and prayer. She pulled Becky into her arms. The girl’s eyes did not focus.

Becky’s father was still in the car yelling at whoever had the misfortune to be on the other end of his call. No one inside the school had seen. Elly was on her own.

She tore open Becky’s coat. Wooden toggles clattered down the sidewalk. She tugged down the girl’s sweater and pressed against her chest. If she had a pulse, it was too faint to feel.

Elly stared straight ahead. At her maple. At the sky. They gave no answers and so she looked within herself.

Later she would try to figure out why she touched Becky’s throat. She didn’t know if it was desperation or madness or something in the deepest reaches of her memory coming to the surface that caused her to trace figure eights across the girl’s neck, around and around and around as silver light collected in her fingernail, bright as a welder’s torch, then poured into Becky’s chest.

Her throat.

Her lungs.

Her heart.

Her lymph.

Her blood.

Becky thrashed. She coughed red phlegm across Elly’s blouse. Before she could scream, Elly squeezed her tight and whispered something she had said many times before.

“You’re okay, kid. You’re okay.”

And she was. As silent sobs racked Becky’s chest, Elly used her ruined shirt to wipe the blood off her face. When it was gone, there was no dent in her head, no cut, no wound.

“What happened?” said Becky.

“You fell.”

“That was scary.”

“Extremely.”

“But am I hurt?”

“You tell me.”

Becky smiled. She hopped up and did a little twirl, then ran laughing to her father’s car. She used her whole body to wrench open the door, climbed inside, pulled the door shut and buckled herself into the car seat. She yelled words Elly couldn’t hear but which probably had something to do with, “Happy holidays.”

The car drove away.

Elly climbed the steps. Her chest was sticky with blood. She picked up Becky’s beanie and hung it on the school door. Davida would make sure Becky got it back. Her empty folder lay beside the laminated maple leaves. She traced her finger around their jagged edges, reasonably certain that she would never be young again.

United Airlines Flight 89 left Newark at 11:50 a.m. It would be fourteen hours to Beijing. Four more to Lhasa. Elly had paid through the nose for a middle seat. She was quite cramped. She did not mind.

The flight attendant brought her bloody Mary mix. Elly drank it in a gulp. She picked up her Rex Stout but found her hands shaking too much for her to read.

She checked the time.

A few minutes later, she checked it again.

She was so very eager to land.

Support Strange Pulp!