When I was writing my young-adult short-story collection, Killing Miss Kitty and Other Sins, I couldn’t quite decide whether I was writing memoir or fiction. Sometimes what I wrote was authentically memoir, but the longer, more shaped pieces tended toward fiction. Because I had to decide to go one way or the other, I chose to present the longer short stories as fiction and to take the authentically memoir pieces out for another collection.

I have several other projects I need to complete before I can return to the memoir pieces to decide exactly what to do with them, but in the meantime, I thought it would be fun to share them. So I’m putting them in here, one at a time.

6. Second-Grade Lesson

I was a desk carver. I developed my artistic career in the first grade. I must have been bored, because I spent much of the year doodling on my desk, pressing beneath the varnished surface with the point of a pencil until the entire desktop was scored with lines, letters, faces, flowers. To tell the truth, I used to wonder why no one interfered with my pastime, but Miss Christian, our rather fierce first-grade teacher with the pock-marked face, never seemed to notice my endeavors, at least not until the last day of school. Then, belatedly it seemed to me, the janitor was brought in, and I was made to confess.

Miss Christian loomed over me. “You wouldn’t carve up your mother’s furniture at home, would you?”