by Alex Mar,

Fall 2015

“Maybe it was during nap time or snack time or shortly after their
parents dropped them off each day, but it was certainly during preschool
hours that the teachers Mrs. McMartin and Mr. Buckey led the children
through trapdoors in the classroom floor and down into the maze of
tunnels. There below, the cold walls were covered in images of Satan,
with his red face and massive horns (any child would have recognized
him). There underground, the children—all of them young, between two and
five years old—were touched in private places and made to pose for
dirty pictures. And maybe those tunnels made up a vast underground
network, because somehow, in daylight, without any witnesses, the
teachers managed to take the entire class to a nearby Episcopal church,
where the grown-ups donned black robes and masks and stood before the
altar and slit the throats of baby rabbits and birds and even a couple
of turtles, letting the hot blood run into fancy cups. And they passed
the cups to the children and forced them to drink the animals’ blood.
And babies were killed (maybe); and corpses were dug up from the ground
(maybe); and the teachers took the kids out into the cemetery, among the
tombstones, and touched them between their legs. And once Mr. Buckey
took a long knife and chopped a pony to death right in front of them,
saying that their parents would die that way, too, if any of the
children said a word about anything that had happened at preschool that
day or any other day or ever. And everybody spoke the name of the Devil
over and over again, dancing.

…