Gary Fincke ~ During the Epidemic

We brought a dime every Friday to slide into a slot inside a card fea­tur­ing a smil­ing girl on crutch­es. I loved see­ing my card fill up. When there were ten dimes, we would start again on a card with a crip­pled boy. Miss Klein, our fourth-grade teacher, kept our cards inside her desk. “Wash your hands, all of you,” she said, after we slot­ted our dimes. “There’s no telling who han­dled those coins. How filthy he was and what you could catch.”

Every day, just after lunch, Miss Klein inspect­ed our desks. They need­ed to be clean. No crumbs inside or out.They need­ed to be spot­less before we had pub­lic health. Fifteen min­utes, Miss Klein said, of life­sav­ing. The con­ta­gious, she explained, leave filth that hides on bus­es and street­cars and seats at the movies. You’ll nev­er know who’s been there and giv­en you the itch and fes­ter. The con­ta­gious nev­er cov­er their mouths when they sneeze. They wipe their noses on their sleeves where crusts col­lect like scabs that bleed. They bor­row combs and touch foun­tains with their mouths. They gob­ble food they drop on the floor. They squat on pub­lic toi­lets and nev­er scrub with water that’s been run to scald­ing hot, but you won’t know who they are until they car­ry that filth to you like flies. Look around. You’ll see what I mean. Eyes open, class. Keep your­selves clean. Filth is a wel­come mat for polio.

Always, she said, “Polio,” at the end of her speech, snarling it like a curse. Always, she took a deep breath and said, “Polio doesn’t go away like chick­en pox or the measles. You wear braces and use crutch­es like poor Richard Hartman, who’s missed so much school he’ll fall a year behind.” Always, every­body looked at Richard Hartman’s emp­ty desk, some of us touch­ing our desk­tops as if filth had returned while we listened.

Look at this pho­to­graph,” Miss Klein said on the last day of school, walk­ing up and down the aisles so all of us could see. “Those chil­dren are stuck for­ev­er in iron lungs. Those chil­dren will nev­er do any­thing but lie inside them so they can breathe.” She paused by Richard Hartman’s emp­ty desk and said, “Remember to keep clean.”

All sum­mer, I washed my hands before lunch and din­ner. I cleaned my crumbs off the table. I swam in the coun­ty park lake with Jerry Mushik, who swal­lowed the water as if the con­ta­gious nev­er peed there. He said nobody in our town but Richard Hartman ever got polio. He said Miss Klein wasn’t our teacher any­more. She’d have Richard Hartman again next year and have to shut up about polio every day he wasn’t absent.

In September, Richard Hartman, wear­ing leg braces and using crutch­es, was still with our class. Mrs. Gardiner nev­er checked our desks after lunch, but she had new March of Dimes cards for each of us, even Richard Hartman. “The dimes aren’t going to help that boy,” my moth­er said. “It’s too late for that.”

Jerry Mushik laughed when I washed my hands after I insert­ed my first dime. He put his on his tongue and closed his mouth. “Fuck polio,” he whis­pered. For the next three weeks, he licked his dime. In October, in the cloak room before school, he forced two boys to lick their dimes. None of them got sick.

~

Gary Fincke’s lat­est col­lec­tion is The Sorrows (Stephen F. Austin, 2020). Earlier col­lec­tions have won the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction and the Elixir Press Fiction Prize.His sto­ry “The Corridors of Longing” is reprint­ed in Best Small Fictions 2020. An essay “After the Three-Moon Era” appears in Best American Essays 2020. He is co-edi­tor of the anthol­o­gy series Best Microfiction.