[REDACTED]
GUEST OPINION:
We must take action regarding the [REDACTED] High School janitor
Dale [REDACTED], History Teacher
Editorial note: The following text was found inscribed on the shell of a dying oversized turtle on [REDACTED] Beach during the most recent appearance of the beach. Authorities have confirmed the author is Dale [REDACTED], former history teacher at [REDACTED] High. Mr. [REDACTED] has been missing and presumed dead since November 1972.
I am writing this opinion letter because the situation at [REDACTED] High School has gotten too far out of hand. When I began teaching at [REDACTED] High over twenty years ago, we had pride. This school boasted a graduation rate of over fifty percent and an annual student survival rate of nearly seventy-five percent. The audio-visual club was known throughout our town—heck, the entire county— for its award-winning radio show, [REDACTED].
In those days, the shadow on the swimming pool’s surface was only a brushstroke, a trick of the eye, and one could look straight into the water without fear of the tunnels. I will admit to noticing a steady decline in school conditions in the intervening years, but even recently it provided an adequate learning environment.
The mimics which sprang from the tunnels were typically killed with ease. Sure, survival rates plummeted—due in part to the mimics’ awful, grating gaze, but those students who survived the tunneling thrived in the classroom.
All this changed when the janitor was born. I don’t take pleasure in saying I told you so or this-and-that and what-have-you, but I immediately and loudly made known my objection to the janitor’s hiring. Its demands for employment, its disgusting threats, were quite simply rude and unprofessional.
What do we know about the condition of the school?
All the doors are gone. When I want to go outside, I crash through the windows, but the outside becomes inside and I’m right back where I started, only colder. I spend days picking glass from my skin and lose too much blood.
I cannot start a fire. I suspect oxygen levels are low.
The children have been absent since the last evacuation. It is a shame, a tragedy, to continue withholding their education because of the antics of the janitor, who must be confronted.
I am, to my knowledge, alone save the janitor and the turtle.
What we know about the janitor:
It doesn’t let me near the basement. When once I ducked my head through the splintered wood of the cellar chamber hatch, it screamed. I have not slept since. The sadness, the terror of the janitor’s scream will stay with me always.
Its skin is always wet.
Once daily, it lurches to the science room to feed a serum to the turtle by syringe. The turtle is now so large it couldn’t possibly fit through the door and will, at this rate, soon outgrow the classroom.
Its legs are truly too long.
Do you know what I saw when I looked into the janitor’s cellar in the second before its scream? The floor is a thick skin, perhaps a leather or a membrane, black and wet, heaving slowly like an exposed heart. What else is the janitor keeping down there?
Fellow citizens of [REDACTED], it’s high time we fire the janitor and return [REDACTED] High School to its former glory.
Sincerely, yours in silence, from the cold hollow, in reverence to the turtle, with respect to those lost to the tunneling,
Dale [REDACTED],
History Teacher
[REDACTED] High School