David Newhoff

The Magpie

The magpie crunched a still-kicking beetle in its cadmium yellow beak while perched on the skull that had once been used by a special-needs schoolteacher named Stacey Dobbs, but which presently housed a cacophony of insects harvesting the few remaining bits of soft tissue. Mrs. Dobbs’s last favorite student had been Max. Seven years old. Adopted from Ethiopia by Steven and Miranda Schwartzberg. He was so sweet. And the way he beamed every morning when he arrived at school was that year’s reminder why she did what she did, despite how heartbreaking the job could be at times. Yet, for some reason, the last image to light up the hippocampus, neocortex, and amygdala—all long-since digested into the biosphere—happened to be the inscrutable frown worn one afternoon on the face of little Eileen Davis, one of her first students. Strange. She hadn’t thought of Eileen in years.