Greatest Chain of All

by Julia Faour

“Dear Lord, I pray for the strength to endure the work day, but most of all, I pray Charlotte won’t have another trifecta of accidents, or this time, I’m really going to quit my job. While you’re at it, Lord, would you please, for the love of—Ahem, please make Jack bedridden so that he won’t be at the center today. In Jesus’s name, Amen.”

Miss Sophie unclasped her hands and rolled her eyes. Apparently, assaulting a teacher, choking out another kid, and destroying school property weren’t enough reasons to kick Jack out of the early childhood education center—but what did Miss Sophie know? She’s just a Pre-K teacher, not the director, after all.

There was a lot, it would seem, Miss Sophie didn’t know.

When she had made a report to the director about Miss Vanessa vaping in the center parking lot every morning before coming into direct contact with susceptible three-year-olds, it was her, not Miss Vanessa, who got into trouble and was ultimately relocated to a different classroom.

She had also learned that joking about killing yourself was a perfectly acceptable way of coping with workplace depression. So, if Miss Vanessa wanted to talk about hanging herself on the playground swing set every day during recess, she was welcome to process her childhood trauma and intense self-loathing through her own means. It was Miss Sophie who really ought to check her religious biases against mentally ill people and learn how to take a joke.

There was also the other incident with Miss Vanessa that the director never did end up hearing about, partially because Miss Sophie was too mortified to share and she could’ve predicted the response, anyway. She was the homophobe who was so intolerant she refused to hear anything about her gay co-worker’s open relationship, let alone the most intimate details of her sex life, in a professional work environment while parents and their five-and-under toddlers arrive for the day.

But what did Miss Sophie know?

She was only nineteen, barely out of high school and the youngest teacher in the entire building. An immature, inexperienced, selfish, prideful, self-righteous, know-it-all. Who was she to tell an adult what is and is not appropriate for a work environment?

 She was not a forty-two-year-old divorced director addicted to scrolling through Facebook and fighting on the phone with her ex during work hours.

No, she was just the one currently shielding Cordelia from Psychopath Jack’s choking attempts, while splitting her attention between the other twenty-nine maniacs, after having cleaned up the fourth accident of the day and her shirt sleeve endlessly tugged by grimy hands paired with infuriatingly high pitched, “teacher, he did this,” and “teacher, she did that,” exercising a whole new level of self-control unknown to man to not just say “to hell with it all” and frisbee throw all the magnet tiles everyone is fighting over straight out the window.

Instead, Miss Sophie rubbed her temples and downed her third Monster energy drink of the day, mentally noting which children she needed to specifically pull aside now or could save for later. Jack had already been talked to and sent to Cozy Corner to decompress, so that left resolving Hendrique, the Wannabe Ninja’s current rampage of karate chopping people in the butt and explaining yet again to “Double Trouble” Charlotte and Cordelia, why they can’t use the classroom scissors to cut each other’s hair, even though the scissors are conveniently accessible at all times because the state for some reason requires it.

Does everyone just exist to make my life miserable? she thought.

“Friends,” Miss Sophie plastered on a smile, forcing herself to use her teacher voice, “If this is how we’re going to behave during choice time, we’re going to be all done. Remember, we need to use walking feet, gentle hands, and quiet inside voices. Let’s be sure to make wise decisions with our bodies at school.” Her right eye twitched. “Your teacher can’t afford to get sued by your parents, so please, show me how to behave for the next thirty minutes and you can earn a marble for our classroom jar.”

Choice time was a special kind of daily torture. Its function was to section off time apart from lessons to provide children with the opportunity to make their own choices during play and to hopefully learn from the consequences, such as how Mommy reacted to cutting a friend’s hair. In effect, it would ultimately help develop the children’s emotional intelligence and self-regulation during their most formative years of development. For Miss Sophie, however, it meant handing out a stack of incident reports at the end of each day to exhausted parents already eager to bite somebody’s head off.

Miss Sophie sighed and collapsed into her desk chair. In the split second she sat down to gather herself, the director swung open her classroom door for one of her “surprise” inspections.

Miss Sophie groaned and quickly pretended to busy herself with the blank incident reports scattered across her desk.

“Taking a break again? You’re always—”

It was the same old lecture she always heard. The longer the director went on, the more and more tempted Miss Sophie felt to grab the bucket of magnet tiles. She imagined taking them, one by one, and throwing them like ninja stars, lodging the director’s skull into the wall behind her. And then—

—the director was gone. Miss Sophie sighed.

What is wrong with me? I can never do anything right, can I?

A series of quick footsteps seized her attention. Startled, she jerked her head up to see Hendrique running toward her as fast as his tiny legs could carry him.

She steadied her voice. “Hendrique, walking feet please.”

He did his best to comply, speed walking with an excited skip in his step.

“Hey, Miss Sophie.” He nuzzled his face into her elbow. “You my best fwend. I love you.”

Her mouth parted, eyes softening. A new slight smile hung on the edge of her lips as she rustled his hair. Then, her face transformed into a look of horror.

She stared down at him, a new resentment rising within her. He had sentenced her to another tomorrow.

BIO

Julia Faour writes about the beauty and brokenness of the human psyche. She has an English BA in Creative Writing and is a Colorado Christian University graduate.