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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Art Fall 2021 >
      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
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    • Issue #22 Poetry Fall 2021 >
      • Maureen Alsop Fall 2021
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      • Adam Tavel Fall 2021
      • Sara Moore Fall 2021
      • Karen Rigby Fall 2021
      • Daniel Zhang Fall 2021
      • Erika Lutzner Fall 2021
      • Kindall Fredricks Fall 2021
      • Cin Salach Fall 2021
      • Andrew Zawacki Fall 2021
      • Micah Ruelle Fall 2021
      • Rachel Stempel Fall 2021
      • Haley Wooning Fall 2021
      • Rikki Santer Fall 2021
      • Evy Shen Fall 2021
      • Suzanne Frischkorn Fall 2021
      • Danielle Rose Fall 2021
      • Eric Burgoyne Fall 2021
      • John Cullen Fall 2021
      • Maureen Seaton Fall 2021
      • Hannah Stephens Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
      • Kevin Grauke Fall 2021
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      • Amy Nicholson Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Fiction Fall 2021 >
      • Tina Jenkins Bell Fall 2021
      • David Obuchowski Fall 2021
      • Thomas Misuraca Fall 2021
      • Aiden Baker Fall 2021
      • Jenny Magnus Fall 2021
  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
      • Jonathan Kvassay Spring 2022
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      • Layla Garcia-Torres Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Poetry Spring 2022 >
      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
      • T.D. Walker Spring 2022
      • Jen Schalliol Huang Spring 2022
      • Yvonne Zipter Spring 2022
      • Carrie McGath Spring 2022
      • Lupita Eyde-Tucker Spring 2022
      • Susan L. Leary Spring 2022
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      • Rita Mookerjee Spring 2022
      • Erin Carlyle Spring 2022
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      • Jen Karetnick Spring 2022
      • Meghan Sterling Spring 2022
      • Lorelei Bacht Spring 2022
      • Michael Passafiume Spring 2022
      • Jeannine Hall Gailey Spring 2022
      • Phil Goldstein Spring 2022
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      • Anna Laura Reeve Spring 2022
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      • Sarah A. Rae Spring 2022
      • Brittney Corrigan Spring 2022
      • Callista Buchen Spring 2022
      • Issam Zineh Spring 2022
      • MICHAEL CHANG Spring 2022
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      • Leah Umansky Spring 2022
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      • Rachel DeWoskin Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
      • Melissa Boberg Spring 2022
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  • Issue #24 Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Art Fall 2022 >
      • Marsha Solomon Fall 2022
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    • Issue #24 Nonfiction Fall 2022 >
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      • Anna Oberg Fall 2022
      • Acadia Currah Fall 2022

Kathryn Kruse

Sex Ed


One afternoon in the 5th grade the boys and the girls were cleaved from each other.
 
​
The Boys
 
          We were shuffled from the gym into a classroom and, after a few minutes, Mr. Millins wheeled in the TV cart. A movie. A real treat. He bent and grunted, plugged in the VCR and the TV. He pushed in a tape and then ambled to the back of the room and sat in one of the child-sized seats.
          We watched a single, unbroken shot. The camera did not move. We struggled to define the image. Through context clues, the identification of thighs, of a butt, we understood that we looked at a vagina. For most of us this was our first vagina. It was furry and confusing.  Just as we identified the object it transformed, stretching, screaming, blood and shit and undefined muck, like snot, like pudding, there on the screen. The vagina shit itself. Some other thing, some other harry flesh emerged from the vagina and retracted, emerge and retracted. The other thing became a head, a head like an old man, a head like an alien covered in snot and blood and hands pulled a baby from the vagina. We thought the movie would end now but it began again, the stretching and screaming and the vagina pushed out a chunk of something misformed, dead.
          Mr. Millins paced silently to the TV cart, held down the rewind button and we watched the dead thing and the mucky, skinny baby and the blood and shit and snot go back into the vagina and then Mr. Millins took his finger off the rewind button and we saw it all again. After the dead thing came out of the vagina a second time, Mr. Millins unplugged everything and wheeled the TV cart out. For several minutes we sat quiet, unsupervised. Mr. Millins returned.
          “Go to the lunch room,” he said. “Single file.”
 
 
The Girls
 
          They took the boys away and we were left in the cavernous gym. We, all, had been seated together so, when the boys left, gaps existed between us, girls adrift and stranded cross legged on the shellacked wood. They were saving energy a lot that year so the lights remained mostly off except one row of florescent tubes on the far edge of the ceiling.
          Ms. Jenevieve said, “Girls, we have a special visitor.”
          A nun came and stood in front of us.
          The nun spoke about how she had been a fallen woman. How she had made a baby inside her. How she had birthed the baby and how the baby had been taken from her so that it could have a better life. She told us she had become a nun when she was eighteen. The way she talked, the inflection, we expected her to touch her belly but her hands always stayed stretched a few inches to the sides of her body.
          She spoke and, if we leaned the right way, we could make it so that, from our perspective, her head blotted out the basketball hoop behind her.
          “Sit still,” Ms. Jenevieve said,  in the same yelling tone that our mothers used if they were scared we were going to tumble out of a third-story window.
          The nun went to the big double doors of the gym and opened one and wheeled a trolley back to where she had been standing. The trolley had a tall something on it covered with a sheet. She pulled the sheet off and reviled a bloody, skinny Jesus. He looked upwards, begging for something, rivulets of blood all down his ears and cheeks and nose. He held his hands out a few inches from the sides of his body, the palms full of blood as if he was going to cup his hands and drink.
          The nun told us that this was where she found salvation and where she would remain for eternity. She covered up the Jesus and Ms. Jenevieve applauded so we all applauded and the nun wheeled the Jesus out.
          Ms. Jenevieve left for a while and then rolled the TV cart in, plugged in everything, turned off the row of lights and started a video. In the movie nuns sang in a choir and then the camera zoomed in on a Jesus and then one nun sat in a small room for a while and then the camera zoomed in on a Jesus and then, on top of Jesus’s bloody face the screen said St. Magdalene for the Fallen, and then the screen went to static.
          “All right, girls. Let’s head over to the lunch room,” said Ms. Jenevieve and she turned on the one row of lights and we all filed to the lunchroom where they had Capri Sun juice boxes lined up on a table and we each took one and, as gently a possible, punctured a hole in it with the pointed end of the straw. After a minute the boys came in and we made way for them to get to the juice boxes.
 
 
Senior Year
           
          We all asked each other to the prom. We went to the high school gym and wondered what would happen, after midnight, in the back seats of cars. We drank juice from plastic Champaign glasses. If we were not careful the long plastic stems of the glasses disconnected from their round bases and toppled over. The tables and floors and our hands became sweet and sticky. 






--
Kathryn Kruse is a writer and educator living in Chicago and the executive director of Residency on the Farm, an interdisciplinary artists residency. She has received a Disquiet International Literary Program scholarship and is a finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award. Among other places, her work is forthcoming from or has appeared on the walls of the I Hope You Are Feeling Better Collaborative Art Exhibition, on the stages of the San Francisco Olympians Festival and in the pages of Indian Review, Quiddity, Interim, and The Adirondack Review.

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  • Home
  • About
    • Our Story
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  • Features
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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Art Fall 2021 >
      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
      • Camilla Taylor Fall 2021
      • Guilherme Bergamini Fall 2021
      • Emanuela Iorga Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Poetry Fall 2021 >
      • Maureen Alsop Fall 2021
      • Annah Browning Fall 2021
      • Romana Iorga Fall 2021
      • Natalie Hampton Fall 2021
      • Sherine Gilmour Fall 2021
      • Adam Day Fall 2021
      • Amanda Auchter Fall 2021
      • Adam Tavel Fall 2021
      • Sara Moore Fall 2021
      • Karen Rigby Fall 2021
      • Daniel Zhang Fall 2021
      • Erika Lutzner Fall 2021
      • Kindall Fredricks Fall 2021
      • Cin Salach Fall 2021
      • Andrew Zawacki Fall 2021
      • Micah Ruelle Fall 2021
      • Rachel Stempel Fall 2021
      • Haley Wooning Fall 2021
      • Rikki Santer Fall 2021
      • Evy Shen Fall 2021
      • Suzanne Frischkorn Fall 2021
      • Danielle Rose Fall 2021
      • Eric Burgoyne Fall 2021
      • John Cullen Fall 2021
      • Maureen Seaton Fall 2021
      • Hannah Stephens Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
      • Kevin Grauke Fall 2021
      • Courtney Justus Fall 2021
      • Amy Nicholson Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Fiction Fall 2021 >
      • Tina Jenkins Bell Fall 2021
      • David Obuchowski Fall 2021
      • Thomas Misuraca Fall 2021
      • Aiden Baker Fall 2021
      • Jenny Magnus Fall 2021
  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
      • Jonathan Kvassay Spring 2022
      • Karyna McGlynn Spring 2022
      • Andrea Kowch Spring 2022
      • Layla Garcia-Torres Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Poetry Spring 2022 >
      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
      • T.D. Walker Spring 2022
      • Jen Schalliol Huang Spring 2022
      • Yvonne Zipter Spring 2022
      • Carrie McGath Spring 2022
      • Lupita Eyde-Tucker Spring 2022
      • Susan L. Leary Spring 2022
      • Kate Sweeney Spring 2022
      • Rita Mookerjee Spring 2022
      • Erin Carlyle Spring 2022
      • Cori Bratty-Rudd Spring 2022
      • Jen Karetnick Spring 2022
      • Meghan Sterling Spring 2022
      • Lorelei Bacht Spring 2022
      • Michael Passafiume Spring 2022
      • Jeannine Hall Gailey Spring 2022
      • Phil Goldstein Spring 2022
      • Michael Mingo Spring 2022
      • Angie Macri Spring 2022
      • Martha Silano Spring 2022
      • Vismai Rao Spring 2022
      • Anna Laura Reeve Spring 2022
      • Jenny Irish Spring 2022
      • Marek Kulig Spring 2022
      • Jami Macarty Spring 2022
      • Sarah A. Rae Spring 2022
      • Brittney Corrigan Spring 2022
      • Callista Buchen Spring 2022
      • Issam Zineh Spring 2022
      • MICHAEL CHANG Spring 2022
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Spring 2022
      • Leah Umansky Spring 2022
      • Cody Beck Spring 2022
      • Danyal Kim Spring 2022
      • Rachel DeWoskin Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
      • Melissa Boberg Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Nonfiction Spring 2022 >
      • Srinaath Perangur Spring 2022
      • Audrey T. Carroll Spring 2022
  • Issue #24 Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Art Fall 2022 >
      • Marsha Solomon Fall 2022
      • Edward Lee Fall 2022
      • Harryette Mullen Fall 2022
      • Jezzelle Kellam Fall 2022
      • Irina Greciuhina Fall 2022
      • Natalie Christensen Fall 2022
      • Mark Yale Harris Fall 2022
      • Amy Nelder Fall 2022
      • Bette Ridgeway Fall 2022
      • Ursula Sokolowska Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Poetry Fall 2022 >
      • William Stobb Fall 2022
      • e Fall 2022
      • Stefanie Kirby Fall 2022
      • Lisa Ampleman Fall 2022
      • Will Cordeiro Fall 2022
      • Jesica Davis Fall 2022
      • Peter O'Donovan Fall 2022
      • Mackenzie Carignan Fall 2022
      • Jason Fraley Fall 2022
      • Barbara Saunier Fall 2022
      • Chad Weeden Fall 2022
      • Nick Rattner Fall 2022
      • Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow Fall 2022
      • Summer J. Hart Fall 2022
      • Daniel Suá​rez Fall 2022
      • Sara Kearns Fall 2022
      • Millicent Borges Accardi Fall 2022
      • Liz Robbins Fall 2022
      • john compton Fall 2022
      • Esther Sadoff Fall 2022
      • Whitney Koo Fall 2022
      • W. J. Lofton Fall 2022
      • Rachel Reynolds Fall 2022
      • Kimberly Ann Priest Fall 2022
      • Annie Przypyszny Fall 2022
      • Konstantin Kulakov Fall 2022
      • Nellie Cox Fall 2022
      • Jennifer Martelli Fall 2022
      • SM Stubbs Fall 2022
      • Joshua Bird Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Fiction Fall 2022 >
      • Otis Fuqua Fall 2022
      • Hannah Harlow Fall 2022
      • Natalia Nebel Fall 2022
      • Kate Maxwell Fall 2022
      • Helena Pantsis Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Nonfiction Fall 2022 >
      • Courtney Ludwick Fall 2022
      • Anna Oberg Fall 2022
      • Acadia Currah Fall 2022