by Rebecca Klassen
I haven’t seen him since he was a boy, and even though he has his back to me, I recognize him in my headlights. It’s his oblong head and right-angle-ears that ring familiar. He staggers from alcohol, lurching off the end of the pavement onto the country lane. The national speed limit signs rise like masts from the hedgerows that line the way home. I know every turn, blind corner, pothole, and narrowing, along here, but I’ve never driven at sixty because I’m not stupid. Or maybe I am, because I’m pulling up alongside him and winding down the passenger window, his breathing heavy over the engine. Guilt over what I did to him shudders inside me like animal skin.
He’s clutching a polystyrene tray of chips smothered in a brick-coloured sauce, the spicy scent making my mouth water. Chewing and smiling as he leans towards the open window, I see the potato churning in his mouth. His smile disappears when he realises it’s me.
‘Mrs North.’ He pronounces it ‘norf’, maybe because of the drink, or maybe because some habits never die.
‘Let me give you a lift, Tyler. It’s dangerous to walk down here, especially at night.’ I’m tired, so I sound whiny. We haven’t spoken since he was eight years old, so I’m unsure how to convince this man version of Tyler to get in. Not that I was ever able to convince him of anything when he was my student, even after his left cheek glowed from the slap I’d delivered as hard as I could. Now, he’s an intoxicated man with broad shoulders and a justified grudge I’m sure he’s nurtured for the past fifteen years. I suspect he’ll tell me to eff off, but instead he opens the car door and gets in, his eyes fixed on the moths dancing in the headlights ahead.
I accelerate.
We’ve seven minutes until we’re off the lane and I can let him out. I crack my window because his aftershave is mixing with the now overpowering chips and curry sauce, which he’s stopped eating. The engine’s roar doesn’t fill the silence between us like I’d hoped, and I wonder if he’s too drunk to listen to apologies, to hear me say that what I did was inexcusable but hopefully not unforgivable. He speaks first, and it startles me.
‘You still teach?’
‘I do.’
He gives a small, breathy laugh that I deserve. A polite reflex makes me ask, ‘And what are you up to these days?’
He laughs again, big and bold now. ‘Didn’t you hear? I’m chancellor of the bloody exchequer. Left my Jag back at the pub.’
Six minutes now until I can let him out. None of his words are slurred as I’d expected. My cheeks are numbed by the breeze, and I debate offering him to slap me – an eye for an eye, making us even.
But it wouldn’t.
I glance at his clublike fists holding his chip tray. I should’ve let him walk the lane, left this nightmare in the past. He’d have been home in an hour, likely unscathed. Belly full and his mood still high.
We pass the first of the sharp bend signs, withering carnations taped to its post in memory of the cyclist killed three months ago. Then headlights grow quickly in the distance and dash past us.
No, I think I’ve made the right choice.
Tyler asks, ‘Did you ever tell anyone the truth about what you did to me?’
‘Yes.’ I don’t tell Tyler that I told my husband, Jim, who agreed that I should lie to keep my job, which worked. I told the headteacher that Tyler had smacked himself with a book during a tantrum, then spun a story when I tried to take the book away for his own protection.
‘Did they think you were a bitch, too?’
‘Probably,’ I say. Jim had been understanding when I told him what I’d done, even kind, which felt worse somehow. Then he’d suggested that I change careers; an office job.
Tyler lifts his hand to scratch his nose, and I inadvertently flinch. Five minutes before I can let him out. He asks, ‘Have you ever hit any other kids?’
Just like when he was a boy. Lots of questions, trying to figure out his place in the world.
‘No, just you.’
In my peripheral, he shakes his head and delivers more of that breathy laughter. ‘I must’ve really got under your skin,’ he says.
I tap the brake for a hairpin bend, feeding the wheel through my hands, three passes to the left, three passes to the right, the rhythm of it and the concentration making me take a breath before I speak.
‘Got under my skin? You caused me so much stress my hair fell out.’
‘That wasn’t me.’
His words plant me back in the classroom, with the drawing pins on my seat, my lost toenail from him stamping on me in football studs, the school guinea pig he’d killed by feeding it Blu Tack, ripping up my books and wall displays.
Throwing a chair at my growing baby bump.
He said it every time: that wasn’t me.
Four minutes until I can let him out. I momentarily veer over the white lines to avoid the anticipated pothole. We go past the dead tree, its most dominant branch pointing behind us. I consider putting the radio on, because nothing I say can make anything right between us. Instead, I repeat exactly what he said before I slapped him.
‘I’m going to hurt you so much that your baby dies. You said that not long after you’d thrown a chair at me. Even though you lied a lot, I believed you.’
Tyler picks up a long, floppy chip and pulls it into his mouth with his tongue, speaking as he eats. ‘I was only a kid. You were just chickenshit.’
I squeeze the steering wheel and feel my face burn, slowing the car for the blind corner. Three minutes before I can let him out. I turn us gently round a tight bend.
‘The thing is,’ he says, ‘I reckon you wouldn’t change a thing. You’d probably like to wallop me now, wouldn’t you?’
I brake sharply for what’s in the road. Tyler’s chips hit the windscreen, the dry ones ricocheting to the floor, the saucy ones sticking to the glass.
I’m used to seeing foxes dart across the road, but this one is sat facing us, unperturbed by the headlights and the car’s rumble. She stares at me, her teats swollen.
Tyler swears, asking why we’ve stopped, the mess on the windscreen blocking his line of sight to the fox. As I gaze at her, I play what happened that day at school in my head like a movie. The back of the chair hitting my arm as I shielded my unborn daughter, one of the chair legs striking my head, telling little Jenny to go get the headteacher, then remembering he was at a safeguarding conference. I sent the class into the playground because Tyler was still working through his anger, and all I could do, all I was allowed to do was watch.
Two minutes before I can let Tyler out. He leans towards me so he can see around the mess on the windscreen, so close that I hold my breath. Then he holds down my horn, making me jump. The fox doesn’t move.
‘What’s wrong with it? Is it dead?’ A ridiculous question with the thing being stood upright. ‘Is it real?’ Not so ridiculous a question. It’s taxidermy still.
There’s dried blood around her muzzle. She must have cubs in a den nearby, her raison d’etre beating within nature’s chest cavity. In her bulb-bright eyes I see the wildness that flashed in me when Tyler mentioned my baby dying. The slap had been a reflex so primal and undeniable that I wonder whether I’d bared my teeth when I’d struck him.
Without prompt, the fox scurries away, back into the hedgerow to her babies.
‘Of course I wouldn’t hurt you again, Tyler,’ I say. ‘I wish I could undo what happened.’
That laugh again. ‘Sure.’ I notice him squashing the fallen chips with his trainers into the footwell mat.
Pulling away, it’s one more minute until I can let him out, until I can call my daughter on my mobile, tell her I’m nearly home, ask her if she wants to watch Friends and eat popcorn when I get in. She’ll say yes, get a blanket for us, and before we sit down, I’ll give her a hug, which I’ll linger over. She’ll ask what’s up, and I’ll say nothing, it’s just because I love her more than anyone else in the world, and I’d do anything for her.
Absolutely anything.
Rebecca Klassen is co-editor of The Phare and a Best of the Net 2025 nominee from Gloucester, UK. She has won the London Independent Story Prize and has been short and/or longlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award, Flash 500, Bridport Prize, Alpine Fellowship, Laurie Lee Prize, Henshaw Press Competition, Quiet Man Dave Prize, and the Oxford Flash. Her stories have featured in Mslexia, Fictive Dream, Toronto Journal, Shooter, Brussels Review, Molotov Cocktail, Writing Magazine, Flash Frontier, Flash Flood, New Flash Fiction Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Baltimore Review, and have been performed at numerous literature festivals and on BBC Radio.
January House Literary Journal 
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