Radio Belly by Buffy Cram Page A

going slowly, stopping often, so they can copy it all down. You will go through every topic this way. You will explain every last aspect of American life, telling them exactly what to think and why. You will keep them all night if you have to.
    THAT NIGHT, WALKING home through the moonless dark, you can feel people running all around you, making footprints, getting ready. Fire glows in the distance. Butterflies caught in the updraft are shooting up over the hills, raining down like sparks on this side. It looks almost festive, almost like the Fourth of July.
    IN THE MORNING, Mr. Bruce is back, sitting at a tilt on a bench in the school’s entrance, drunk. When he sees you, he pats the bench beside him, “Seat, seat.”
    So you seat. You have so many questions and demands, but before you can get to them, while his eyes are still swimming slow circles around your face, he hands you a letter, already opened.
    Dear Teacher,
    Numerous focus groups and independent consumer trials have demonstrated the relevance of our test product cross-culturally. The most up-to-date research confirms...
    You skip ahead.
    ... It is our understanding that the country you are stationed in is experiencing political upheaval. Studies have shown that our product may be less effective under such circumstance. May we suggest you visit the nearest American Embassy to ensure a safe passage home? Perhaps, once home, you would like to attend one of IELTA ’s many teacher-training seminars held bimonthly in key American cities.
    You fold the letter and tuck it away. “So—war,” you say. It isn’t surprise you feel. It’s a kind of relief, like being caught in the mouth of a hungry thing at last.
    â€œYuh, war,” Mr. Bruce says.
    â€œI’m not leaving,” you declare. “I will not abandon my students. Not now.”
    â€œNo X Test. No Ha-vad,” he says. “Cancelled-cancelled.”
    â€œCan I still teach?” you ask.
    â€œYuh,” he nods. “It can be so.”
    SO YOU TEACH even as your students disappear, one by one, boys and girls, to fight. You teach younger and younger students, first words, then phonics and eventually just the crude sounds of English. You teach because you can and because you’ve realized your mistakes, because you spent all that time on small talk when you should have been clearing the way to Big Talk, when you should have been talking to them about independence and freedom and the difference between right and wrong.
    You continue to teach, even as the bullets ricochet off the school’s tin armour, even after all the women and children are moved into the school basement, the room down there a cross between cellar and cave with its damp walls and its subterranean echo. When the pens and paper run out, you teach by grinding mosquitoes up into a paste to write on the cave walls. And when the mosquitoes run out, you scratch letters into the dirt. And then there is no need for writing anymore because the bodies have started to arrive—your students, returning to you again. Even those who are alive are changed, rearranged. Anything that was soft in them is now hard. Many are maimed and all of them have aged. Their eyes glint like hammered-down nails as they teach you, in perfect English, how to polish the bottle and soak the rag for a Molotov cocktail, how to stitch up a wound and set a bone. Patiently, they show you how to feel your way forward in a darkened cave and when to forget what you cannot save, and all the ways you do not belong to yourself.

The Moustache Conspiracy
    I T’S A BAD IDEA to paddle into the open ocean with Stefan as he is, Mary knows that. It’s irresponsible, even reckless, but she’s had it with resort life. That tiny cabin—so much wood, so little light, like living inside a walnut shell. The structured mealtimes—all those attempts to force friendship over slick buffet food. The whole place overrun with young