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Topic: HOT (08/10/17)
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TITLE: Submarine Sauna Suite | Previous Challenge Entry
By Marlene Bonney
08/16/17 -
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The classrooms of the junior high school, even with opened windows, seemed airless and oh, so hot, air-conditioning not yet anything but a pipedream. Boys wiped their sweaty brows with shirt sleeves while the girls’ hairdos drooped in the humidity, summer’s last attempt to thwart the coming of Fall. Teachers fought a loosing battle to keep their students’ wandering attentions, like sergeants demanding boot camp enrollees discipline and obedience. I drew a picture of old Miss Murphy, my mid-day Algebra teacher, in a soldier’s helmet demanding smart salutes from a line of unruly pupils in front of her ramrod-straight perspiration-stained limp dress. It was a hilarious sight that entertained my closest desk pals, but earned us all after school detentions. Fortunately, these ultimately did not materialize.
Emergency fire drill bells, along with Principal Barton’s raspy voice over the loudspeaker system interrupted, directing all pupils and teachers to the gymnasium that created a panic that superseded all other concerns. Outside the building, tornado sirens blared through the air like a London bomb air raid blitz. We were funneled quickly to a space we had never known existed, and wished we didn’t find out about. I was frightened and kept praying for God to send the tornado to some distant, uninhabited island. Like frantic zombies, our damp hands clasped together with unfamiliar comrades, we marched single-file into a sardine can-like cavern under the school’s swimming pool.
My heart was pumping like an overheated jackhammer as we crammed into a space designed for plumbers and janitors—NOT for a couple hundred panicky adolescents. The usual comedians covered their fear with bravado. I was not one of them. Some of the girls were crying. I, on the other hand, just hid and shoved my panic deep down inside as the claustrophobic heat intensified. We were only allowed to leave the premises if a parent braved the impending doom to pick us up, so that left most of the student body in this dollhouse-sized sauna. One girl fainted next to me and we held her up as best we could, since there was “standing room only.” I was feeling somewhat light-headed myself. I wondered if this is what the Jews felt like when herded to their genocide deaths decades earlier, an event we were currently studying in history class which was appalling and heretofore, unimaginable to us.
We were finally released from our prison several frantic minutes later. Through the pandemonium, it was announced over the loudspeaker that school was dismissed for the day—to an air-ridden silence more ominous than the sirens. I was finally blubbering when I spotted my mother driving up to the rescue, so I would not have to walk home from school as if it had been a normal day. I actually welcomed the ninety-degree heat index which felt as nothing compared to the space under the pool room.
I soon learned that the tornado had touched down a scant 15 miles from our town. Miraculously, there were no casualties, but massive structural damage to a five-mile radius of homes and buildings. A few days later, we drove there, along with other gawkers, to survey the damage and to thank God for His protection. Our community schools developed weather safety areas after that incident, bombarded by parents’ outrage at the school’s handling of that heat wave tornado scare.
I was relieved to hear that the “under-the-pool-room” would never be used again except for maintenance workers, but the ones of us who had been “trapped” there could not help but shudder during our swimming classes’ surface dives.
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I remember the sweltering heat and being stuffed into closets or other small places until the tornado threat had ended.