Slumping deep into the least dilapidated chair in the teachers’ lounge during her lunch break that rainy afternoon in late October 1975, having consumed little of the organic hummus sandwich she had packed, Miss Wyant, the subaltern substitute, worried (after futilely attempting to make the Declaration of Independence’s history relevant to three consecutive classes of bored, ahistorical students) that Center Elementary School would opt not to retain her services once the academic year concluded a month before America’s two-hundredth birthday, July 4, 1976, thus providing her with yet another excuse to loathe herself in an atmosphere of rampant celebratory patriotism.
Copyright © 2019 by David V. Matthews
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