| OCR Text |
Show runs from the room, crying. Where is the class of lovable deaf children, eager for fairy tales and magic? What possessed such a monster to inflict her presence on us, the ghost of her first teacher fast disappearing from our view. "I'll never be a teacher like youi" the aide screams. And the other aide, having accepted all of the children in our program, stares down at the floor, at the monster twice her size who bellows and tries to bite her. She looks in wide-eyed silence. She cares for the other children, and waits for me to win the games yet to be played with Fatty. And I sit on Patty's legs, molding and shaping her face, touching every nerve in my own body with the energy she throws out to me. Energy so chaotic and profuse that I cannot find even a thread to begin with. I am alone, I think. There is no one else to be her teacher, and I am no ghost'. There is no route of escape. It was perhaps even the first week that my nightmares began. Patty, grinning, with a huge wound in her forehead. Patty, blind in the out-of-doors, her arm jerking out at some unknown substance in the air, the side of her face twitching, her head bending low and cocked to the side of her "good" ear- Patty, lost in a strange fit of hysteria, laughing and giggling for hours on end, tears running down her cheeks. Patty, rocking alone in a long corridor, huge trails of dents in the wall, small skin tears on her face and hands, pencil lines of blood running from each. She is St. Sebastian, wounding herself with her own arrows. I cannot sleep because already her well of needs drain from me substances I have not, as yet, learned to see clearly- Substances thinly organized, easily broken. I see the Cheshire cat fading her grin into a tree and her whole body rocking and spinning and falling hard on the ground. Hysterical laughter as she falls, feeling what she can of "Hurting." We establish a routine. No one is to work with her but me. She enjoys performing and smells the fear around her. In the second week, a story comes back via the grapevine. Patty became enraged, for an unestablished reason, and flew about the main sitting room of her hall chasing blind girls and swinging -4- |
