I taught for years at the old Centreville School up north. A one-room schoolhouse, if you can imagine that. I kept chickens in my class, and when each child read, he kept a chicken on his lap. Made the slow readers less antsy. Made the good readers humble. And the children loved it. I loved it. At night I penned the chickens out back of the building, and in the mornings I fed them before I brought them back in. My first Henrietta, an old biddy hen with a sweet temper, was my favorite. Settled right down when the children picked her up.

Today chickens in school are verboten. Hamsters and mice, rodents, yes. Children who live in my building get rats in their beds. They’d do better with chickens. See where their nuggets and fried eggs come from. The girls in 339 across the hall from me, they eat junk. Their mother, she’s a nurse, works nights, brings those girls McDonalds bags when she comes home from work. They go off to school and Lord knows what else they do with a stomach full of grease. That’s what children today are expected to grow on—grease and sugar. The soda they drink! Huge cups the size of slop buckets.

I never had my own children, but after teaching for forty years, I know children better than most mothers. I’ve wiped runny noses, taken care of the feverish ones with compresses and naps on a cot in the coat closet, dried tears, listened to stories of beatings and worse at home, and taught table manners to little ones who never learned to use a fork! I’ve put myself between two fighting boys, each weighing close to two hundred pounds, more than one time. I punished my children with embarrassment, tickling desk sleepers on the back of the necks, making troublemakers my special helpers, not just cleaning the board, but writing up the board lessons, not just sweeping the pine floor, but having them be recess monitors. I only had to take a cane to two children in forty years. One, it taught him. The other one I lost.

My old students don’t know I moved to the city. Sometimes I wish I were back in Centreville, milking the cow, walking down to the school, spreading feed for the chickens. But there’s still some life in this old gal. The super doesn’t know, but the children are good at secrets: I’ve got the latest Henrietta in my apartment. The children from my floor come in after school to play with her. They ask if she laid an egg today. Fuss with her, make sure she’s eating properly. Hold her on their laps, passing her down from youngest to next youngest, when their turn is up. I tell them stories from memory. No need for schoolbooks when you have read the books so many times. I never had my own children, but I know children better than most mothers.

Luanne Castle’s

writing has appeared in Bending Genres, Bull, Cleaver, Copper Nickel, Does It Have Pockets, The Disappointed Housewife, The Dribble Drabble Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Flash Boulevard, Gooseberry Pie, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Pleiades, River Teeth, Roi Fainéant, Saranac Review, South 85 Journal, TAB Journal, Verse Daily, and Your Impossible Voice, among many other journals and anthologies.

Her hybrid memoir-in-flash will be published by ELJ Editions in December 2026. She is also the author of two award-winning full-length poetry collections: Rooted and Winged (Finishing Line Press 2022), a Book Excellence Award Winner; and Doll God (Kelsay Books 2015), which won the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for Poetry. Her chapbooks include Our Wolves (Alien Buddha Press 2023) and Kin Types (Finishing Line Press 2017), a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award.

Author’s website: https://www.luannecastle.com/