The afternoon before school

An original fictional sample story.

The name labels were crooked. I had watched a video about applying them properly and still managed to put one inside the cardigan at a slant. My daughter said it looked as though her name was going down a slide. I told her that would make it easier to recognise.

We had the shoes, the lunch bag, the photograph of the classroom, and a sheet of instructions I had read often enough to know where the staples were. The afternoon before her first day of school, I arranged everything on the bench by the door. Then I rearranged it, because preparation was giving my hands somewhere to put their worry.

She sat on the floor drawing a map. I assumed it was the route to school and began asking whether she remembered where the toilets were. She looked up. The map was of a zoo with a cake shop. The school had not featured in it at all.

I sat beside her. She added a pond and asked whether flamingos liked cake. I said we would need to find out, though people probably shouldn't feed them any. She drew a sign beside the shop to make the rule clear. For a while, we concentrated on the practical difficulties of running this particular zoo.

Eventually, she asked about lunch. Not what was in the bag, but whether she would be able to open it. We brought it over and practised the zip. Then we tried the water bottle, the little food box, and the cardigan buttons. She could manage most of them. We talked about asking an adult when something was stuck.

“Who?” she asked. I pointed to the teacher in the classroom photograph. We looked at the other adults too. The giant, unanswerable question I had been carrying — would she be all right? — became a few smaller things we could actually practise.

That evening, she chose the bedtime story and asked for one extra reading. I gave it to her. At the doorway, I nearly offered a speech about bravery, friendships, and new beginnings. Instead, I said I would be there at pickup, and we agreed which snack would be waiting.

In the morning, she put on the cardigan with the sliding name. At school, she held my hand until we reached the door, then passed her drawing to the teacher. “This is a zoo,” she explained. “There are rules about the cake.” I watched the teacher bend down to look, and for that moment, it was enough.

Illustrative photograph for an original fictional story. Photo: Serjan Midili / Unsplash.