Karmic Chalk

by J. Wheeler

Honorable Mention, Neutrino Short-Short Prize, selected by Stephen Fishbach

I can remember sitting in a therapist’s office as an adult trying to explain my logic. It was not an uncommon dynamic in that office or any of the other similar offices that I have spent too many hours in. The term “faulty thinking” is an official sounding and convenient way for mental health authority figures to tell you that you are just wrong. I have countless times made the case that germ theory was once considered to be a ridiculous concept and now it is widely accepted that germs exist, and we should act accordingly. Some of you still don’t act accordingly and I will continue to judge you for it.

I was explaining to this man that I envisioned a celestial tally board. Not a heaven or Christian god type of celestial, just a tally board suspended in the sky. Strangely this was not the part the therapist took exception to. I know that the board system was not something I planned or designed myself because the straight lines were drawn with chalk, and I hate chalk.

Even writing this safely on my overly clicky keyboard that my dog hates, I can feel the skin on my palms and fingers pucker at the thought of chalk. It’s not just that chalk sheds itself onto you and everything near it, it’s the sensation of the chalk that makes my skin pucker like raisin hands from a long bath or swim, but only dry instead of wet, which makes it so much worse. Chalk hurts my hands and always has.

In elementary school I volunteered for everything. I’m sure I was hated by my classmates. I killed it on the overhead projector. Film strips were my specialty, nobody could turn the knob at the beep like I could. I’m surprised this talent was omitted from my report cards. Need something taken to the office? My hand shot up. I would do anything to distract myself and to prove myself worthy. I wanted to be special, I wanted to be good.

I would volunteer to clean the erasers at the end of the day, even though I hated chalk. There was a machine at the end of the second and third grade hall that washed the erasers. We didn’t always get to use it, although I don’t know why. If we couldn’t use the machine, we had to go out to the lower playground and use the wall that we had to stand or sit against if we were in trouble at recess. Forced to watch our better-behaved classmates run and chase each other, play Four Square or wait in line for a turn at the swings. We hit the black erasers against the brick wall, leaving white eraser footprints against the red brick, clouds of chalk particles hanging in the air and coating our young lungs. No, I would never have chosen chalk.

This man in his faux leather chair got to decide what was real and what was not. He was the director of the behavioral health department for the whole health system which I suppose should have made his rightness carry even more weight. But I had seen this man at every appointment ‘clean’ his glasses by rubbing them with his bare fingers, buffing the lenses with the oil left  over from his face. Explaining to me that this was not just as good as using cleaning fluid and a synthetic cloth or even just a corner of a shirt, but that it was actually better. I knew this man was not to be trusted and I wondered who I could report him to.

I didn’t know if he was religious, I wouldn’t have dared to ask. He did have a Himalayan salt lamp, the first I had ever seen which was cool enough, but I did find the remnants of it that flaked off  onto the heavily varnish table unsettling. I’m unclear what if anything the salt lamp had to do with his belief system other than he said it cleaned the air. More than once I wondered if he could use it on his glasses.

In that geographic area Christianity was the default and the assumed belief system. I should have asked him why or how those stories were bett er than the ones I told myself, but I didn’t. I was accustomed to being told that my reality, my interpretation of the world around me was wrong. I did, however, internally question this man’s stability. I tried to explain the tally board, but he dismissed it out of hand. It was ridiculous he said, no one, nothing is keeping track of what we do. Here I should have asked him about religion, about his in particular. About who is keeping track of what for those people who believe in a Judeo-Christian god and their aspirations of an afterlife on top of puffy white clouds.

Later as I studied and practiced Buddhism I relished in the familiarity of it. It made it seem more woven through the universe and true because there were things—beyond karma that I had always understood to be true despite the world not telling me that they were. It came from a deeper, more primordial place and therefore felt more authentic. Even if I could sit down with this man today or go back in time, I would never convince him that my tally board in the sky holds any validity. Just like he would never convince me that his oily fingers did anything other than make the lenses both equally covered in oil.

J. Wheeler holds not a single degree save his high school diploma. He writes on a loud keyboard that irritates his dog in rural central Pennsylvania. He writes because he cannot afford therapy.