Lilian D. Vercauteren
Lilian D. Vercauteren is a writer from The Netherlands who roamed strange lands for almost 20 years before recently returning to her roots. She started writing at the Writers Studio in Tucson and left a piece of her heart buried somewhere in the wide open spaces of the American West. Her work has appeared in Lowestoft Chronicle, Ghost Parachute, Maudlin House, The Brussels Review and more.
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SCHOOL BAGS​
They were selected for practicality, not color, or brand or cool factor. They were selected for practicality, nothing else, because they could keep together foreign grammar, dead dictator’s speeches, photosynthesis simplified, pi and lunch. They held it all; bulky books and Tupperware neatly organized with parental love and sweaty cheese sandwiches. Colorful travel cups too; filled to the ill-fitting brim with milk by mother dear, gone sour by the 4th period after French. Before the 7th hour, the curdled lumps glued together the pages of a handwritten essay about seals in the North Sea.
They took in papers; pristine, folded, crumbled, hidden, torn or stained with red lines, stripes, crosses and circles, they carried them regardless of the hurriedly scribbled grades, high or low, notes and question marks in the margins. The cheat sheets, the sick note, the anonymous Valentine card, detention rules, locker room rules, timetables, the report cards. They were stretched at the seams, but retained the rubble of crushed gum balls, spilled ink and the well intended, but worn just once, knitted scarf, that movie star’s photo, the moldy gym clothes, the broken friendship bracelets.
They lost the padding in their straps and cut into the shoulders they clung onto. Bags and backs were crushed alike between stone walls and the endless stream of bigger bodies on the staircases. Coat hooks and door handles tore into the taunted canvas in hallways clogged with teenage laughter. They were dropped onto the chlorinated floors of deserted bathrooms, they were sat on, cried on, and wiped clean from paper spitballs, so well-aimed, so sticky.
Nobody really expected them to last the full six years in there, in that learning factory. Zippers gave in, bottoms gave out. They were frayed at the edges, stained, torn, foul
smelling when they were replaced by bags selected for their color, their brand, their shape. And they too were dropped on wet floors, ripped and kicked around because the right amount of nonchalance adds the right stains. But they weren’t snatched away and tossed in trash bins, nobody tried to flush them down a toilet, or throw them down the stairs. And most of them made it out.
Note: This was previously published in Fiction Southeast, a now defunct prose journal.