La Maestra
Maria Criselda R. Santos
Genre: Mystery
Archetype Cards: The Tomboy, The Siren
Key Words: Old photograph, dragon, wings, fan, blood, sacrifice
I first met Mia Vasquez during junior year. She was our English teacher, and she spent a semester with us. The class presumed she had just graduated from college when she started teaching our class. It turned out she was already in her late twenties.
Mia was different. She never spent a session on boring talks on similes and metaphors. She was a metaphor unto herself, transforming before us like the rays of the sun, at once warm and bright. Her smile captivated her young audience, and before long, she had mesmerized half of the male population on campus.
Brent was no exception. He was the god in our batch, accustomed to girls giggling and blushing whenever he passed by. Brent was into womanly girls – big boobs, wide hips, to-die-for curves. Such were rare species in our school.
Our teacher, however, was no womanly girl. She was a WOMAN. The way she flipped her hair, flashed her smile, and walked in her two-inch heels showed she’s been to places. She wielded her fan like a weapon. She knew the ways of the world. She could get what she wanted with a snap of a finger.
Mia is such a beauty, I once heard Brent say. Well, he said that to all the girls he dated. Jenna with the wavy hair. Shane with the navel ring. Michelle with a boyfriend in tow. I recall seeing Mia cross the parking lot to her Toyota Vios. She carried a large book, probably a leather-bound tome once tucked in a hidden shelf in the library. Brent’s gaze was intense. If it could bore a hole on Mia’s back, it would. Brent never looked at me that way. He had always regarded me as one of the boys, someone he could challenge in video games, but he would never spend dinner with.
Rumors spread fast, that Brent spent his last days on earth drinking in Mia’s garage and doodling her name in his Trigonometry notebook. He died in a car crash. Drove under the influence.
A week after Brent’s funeral, we found ourselves listening to the endless drone of a new English teacher. The school wasn’t easy on Mia, too. She resigned from her post without so much as a proper goodbye to the class.
Brent’s death and Mia’s disappearance fanned my curiosity. I had long been aware of the unnatural banter between them, but what happened beyond the campus walls was out of my knowledge. But as luck would have it, I saw Mia one afternoon.
Apparently, she was clearing her desk in the faculty room. Books poked out of her eco bag and her red dress swayed as she walked. I stared, transfixed at the fluidity of the fabric and her movement. Brent ceased living, but Mia never stopped being a metaphor. Her milky white skin and her crimson dress reminded me of Snow White, only older.
“Hi, Rain.” Her voice was like a gentle breeze when she greeted me. “Aren’t you supposed to go home?” she asked.
“Brent’s my friend,” I blurted out.
Something changed in Mia’s expression. The next thing I knew I was in her car, and we were driving to her home.
No one in our class had ever been to her house. Except for Brent, of course. I followed Mia to the living room, which I had imagined as a huge library. There were several books – Milton, Shakespeare, and Machiavelli. A large painting of a Western dragon almost took my breath away. Its wings spread wide, fire bursting from its mouth. Its eyes were glowing embers, and the sun in the background was no match for the colors of the dragon. Then there were photos.
I was especially attracted to a photo of a woman in black and white. Her hair was curly and she smiled shyly at the camera. Mia said her mom was never the outgoing type, a stark contrast to her nature.
In between sips of chamomile tea Mia told me how her mother, Aurora, became popular in the university in the sixties for being an essay writing champion. Aurora wrote a lot of poetry, too, but these were unpublished until her professor discovered her talent for free verse. For years, she was under the tutelage of the said professor, training and writing in her journal every day.
Aurora eventually became famous in literature circles, and her poems found a new vessel. The ink was passion, the language was her body, and the parchment on which she wrote was her lover’s flesh. She and her professor wrote verses from desire, from a forbidden romance.
“You see, Rain, I will never be like my mother,” she said. The gentle voice was gone. The soft countenance was mired by a certain hardness I had never seen in class.
She went on. “I can fall in love, but I can never keep it going. Brent was a funny guy. He was younger, but it didn’t matter, really. But he was a student, and that changed things.”
“The night he died, did you break up with him?”
Mia stood from the couch and poured herself another cup of tea. She said she wasn’t supposed to tell me those things, but she only wanted me to understand.
“Understand what?”
She put her cup down and looked at me with sad eyes. “Fear is like a dragon. It starts small, then it grows inside you, more powerful than before. It will eat you alive unless you learn how to vanquish it.”
The rest of that conversation was a blur, but I remember Mia drove me to our house. Just like the last time she had a class with us, there was no proper farewell. She simply patted my arm and smiled weakly at me. That was the last time I saw her. Last I heard, she had married an architect in San Diego.
Looking back, I realized Mia let her dragon win. How sad must it have been to see Brent so broken, to see him dead and not do anything about it.
The past cannot be undone, though. We have other dragons to deal with.
About Maria Criselda Santos
Maria Criselda Santos has been weaving stories since she was 9. She has written poems, stories, and comic books, too. This is her first time to use Talecraft cards and is very happy about it.