The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell Read Free

teacher absence from the classroom, the students were unable to reach one another. The desks were bolted to the floor to guarantee that there would be no unsupervised physical contact of any kind.
    When we look at the events of that terrible day only eight years in our past, it is important to remember that the teachers of Evergreen Elementary did everything they could: they took every precaution and followed every rule. If there were any justice in the world, they would have been rewarded with long lives, successful careers, and eventual retirement to the virtual education system, where they could have continued to teach until they chose to retire. There would have been no need for them to be lauded as heroes. They would have been forgotten by the march of history, quietly wiped from the memories of all save for the students they mentored, taught, and freed into their own beautiful futures.
    There is no justice in the world. There never has been.
    â€”from Unspoken Tragedies of the American School System by Alaric Kwong, March 19, 2044
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    Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 8:52 a.m.
    It had been a surprisingly quick, smooth load-in process, especially for a Wednesday. Monday and Tuesday, the children were too tired from the weekend to fight. Thursday and Friday, they were too excited that it was almost the weekend again to want to risk getting into trouble. That left Wednesday as the day for troublemakers and tantrums—but all seventeen students had walked through their blood tests and escort as smooth as silk. Miss Oldenburg glanced at the clock as she closed the classroom door. It wasn’t even nine a.m. yet! This was going to be a wonderful day. She could already tell.
    Normally, her class would have consisted of nineteen students, but Amelia’s parents had pulled her out of school to visit a grandparent in Vancouver before the expected laws governing transport of minors across the Canadian border were passed, and Billy had been out sick for most of the week. He’d be allowed to come back once his parents supplied a letter from his doctor certifying that he had been symptom-free for at least five days. Kellis-Amberlee had cured “the common cold,” that vast and intricate web of virtually identical diseases that had been the bane of educators since the first schoolroom was constructed, but not even Kellis-Amberlee could stop the flu, or the lingering strains of pertussis still circulating in the Pacific Northwest, thanks to the efforts of the pre-Rising antivaccination movement. With students increasingly sensitized to anything that smacked of illness, sick children were no longer allowed anywhere near campus, and were shunted to virtual classrooms as soon as their symptoms began.
    It was too bad, really, thought Miss Oldenburg, as she walked around the classroom collecting the coloring sheets she’d used to distract her students as they were bolted to their desks. Billy was one of those rare students who really loved coming to class, despite all the fuss and bother it entailed. She knew full well that some of her kids would drop out of the face-to-face system by fourth grade, choosing the sterile security of a computer screen and a teacher they would never meet over the fleshy dangers of actually attending school. Every teacher in the face-to-face system dreamt of having their students stay on physical campuses all the way to graduation, choosing risk and reward over safety, but none of them had any illusions about how likely that was.
    The elementary schools were relatively full, because kids that young—especially kids too young to amplify—were essentially fearless, unable to really understand why their parents worried so much when they walked out the door. They enjoyed the freedom of recess, and they tolerated the intrusion of the blood tests and the random infection drills. But bit by bit, that bravery would be worn away by the world around them, until most of those