VICTORIA BUITRON
Nature’s Classroom
CW – References to enslavement and the Underground Railroad
They made us slice a sheep’s eye before pretending we were enslaved. I wanted to lick the tapetum—a sheet of turquoise luminescence in the eyeball’s lined back. A foil silver finish to see better in the dark. Humans lack it, our eyes more akin to a pig’s. My crush cut between the cornea and optic nerve with a scalpel. No powdered gloves, vinyl stuck to skin. We never asked our middle names, only dissected tissue of what once breathed, learned our anatomy with parts of a dead animal seeped in formaldehyde. Sclera, extrinsic muscle, fatty tissue, vitreous humor. The moon’s light was missing that night. He wore a plum shirt, forgot a jacket on his bunk bed. Peppermint skin, crinkled October leaves under our sneakers, almost-teen bodies in long double lines. We walked, shoulder to funny bone. Guided by costume-clad men and candlelight on a window. A pretend sheriff stroked a whip. Maybe I conjured the whip. Maybe it was a toy rifle. Maybe it was a sclera-white hand. A voice enjoyed our bowed heads, his face recalled as an abrasion with a Hulihee beard. We hid in a cabin, hunched shoulders and whispers, and used dim laughter to cloak quasi fear born from role play. A simulation to feel what those in the Underground Railroad felt. But how could a few hours and white men shouting reflect pain seeped in hundreds of years. This thought came years later, not as quick as the brain swaps bended light on our retinas. I was eleven. That night sheep and pig eyes jiggled in my cerebrum, the ooze that pooled on the dissecting pan from earlier in the day a gelatinous black hole behind the Milky Way. I wanted to leave by walking on stars and have dirt fall on my hair like sprinkle dust, let our eyes shine pearl when aimed by flashlight, to trace the lines of my crush’s palms with no need to be freed from camp counselors by day, bounty hunters by night.
For additional information about Nature’s Classroom and this type of simulation, please read the following: ‘Students role-playing slaves in Underground Railroad simulation angers some parents; others praise lesson.’
Victoria Buitron is a writer and translator who hails from Ecuador and has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Fairfield University. Her work has been featured or is upcoming in Smokelong en Español, JMWW, Lost Balloon, and other literary magazines. Her debut memoir-in-essays, A Body Across Two Hemispheres, is the 2021 Fairfield Book Prize winner.