The Burning

 *Written on my phone. 

Burning Churches

*anything here resembling real people or events are coincidental

Mrs. Slugger noticed the red star on one of the papers. She checked the name on top. It was Chayden. She always knew he was a trouble maker. She mocked the writing in front of the class because she had dated a writer once. 

Chayden wrote something awful. A grandma with a weather machine who accidentally triggered it while her grandson was playing in the gristmill. He slid down the metal, avoided the grinder, but drowned in the grain bin.

"There are no abandoned gristmills" she laughed. 

Print is dying, the kids should be learning how to create websites, she liked to say. 

She took the paper to Chayden. She asked him what the red star meant, but he just smiled like he always did. She encouraged the violent  children to fight anyone who thought like Chayden. Be good, like the people trying to tear down the abandoned church. 

She advocated for its destruction every Tuesday to the City Council.

"That church isn't safe."

"How about we put a fence around it?" The commissioner asked. 

The people booed. Later his inbox would flood with death threats disguised as jokes. 

The quiet part was never said aloud. The abandoned church had began services once more. 

Then one night, it went up in flames. Mrs. Slugger felt happy. Not only was it finally gone, but now she could point to Chayden.

"Don't be like him. Kids like that grow up to be arsonists"

But it was her husband who gathered foes from the villages of Jaden, Dusty, and Longflower and organized them with masks, equipment,  and plans. He even drove them to the perimeter and drove them to a bus stop so they could escape justice. 

"We had to or they would've turned it into a homeless shelter." He said. 

However her happiness in the morning didn't last. She handed out assignments, got on her computer to look at the damage and to look at photos of the strange preacher who appeared in town. 

The papers came back. She flipped through the until she found the students she liked. Red marks on the top. She scanned the seating arrangement. Her  favorites had switched seats. Now they sat by Chayden. 

"You two go back to your seats. Chayden, hello? You think this is funny?"

He shook his head. His smile was gone.

"Go to the office." She put the papers down and called the office to report the boy for disruptions. 

She graded the rest at home. 

Every page had the same red mark on it. 

The next day she saw the same red mark on the wall of her favorite building. She saw it on her favorite street. At school, she saw it on the faces of her colleagues. On the playground at recess, the children skipped rope over it.

Even her husband ate off a plate with the mark on the porcelain. In bed, they slept with sheets baring the red mark.