Hawkish eyes circle the desks, pausing on potential prey. His torso stills as his bulbous head angles, a jutted chin his only guide. Briefly, he lands on the eager redhead, her pen thrumming a war song against gridded pages. She is a fight he’s unlikely to win — the predator must choose wisely.
He soars toward the back of the room, greedily inspecting the runts, each silently begging to disappear into the rivers of words carved on their desks. They are easy pickings, ready to roll over before the fight has begun. Their predictability bores him.
Decidedly, he flies to the middle, finding a garden variety of twitchy-eyed in-betweeners and somewhat-achievers. They stare at the sweat stains pooling beneath his flapping armpits, unable (or unwilling) to meet his glare. This is where he’ll hunt, he concludes, hungrily searching for his target.
There sits a bug-eyed boy, his apprehensive irises skittering up to the board and back to his page, trying to decipher the predator’s next move. Next door resides an oblivious blonde, innately intelligent but too distracted by the shaggy-haired wannabe two rows back to offer the predator any real thrill.
Finally, he spots her: the pensive, curly-haired girl near the window. She sits lopsided, her left arm extended downward, anxiously spinning the thin rope tied around her ankle. She stares at her textbook, one eye creased, the other taking aim at the quadratic equation before her. Everything about her is unsteady — a top on the verge of tipping over. Perhaps her mother didn’t hold her enough, the predator muses.
The predator taps his talons on the girl’s desk. She looks up, eyes spinning in her skull.
“Please solve equation three on page 230 of your textbook. Write it on the board.”
She stands, back hunched, knees weak, moving slowly toward the ancient chalkboard. White powder coats her fingertips as the crowd watches, bored expressions on their pocked faces. The predator, however, holds his breath, entranced as his old friends X and Y appear in scribbled print.
The curly-haired girl’s shaking fingers give him confidence. He will likely win this fight. With this assurance, a bet ensues: a burger and fries for lunch if she’s wrong. If she’s right? Salad.
He grimaces at the thought of kale and romaine, curling his lips in disgust. He’s lucky he’s so rarely wrong — he hasn’t had a salad in weeks. The chuckle on his tongue fades as Dr. Kim’s stern voice echoes in his mind, blandly listing his ailments: high blood pressure, high cholesterol, overweight, diabetic.
Shaking her words from his ears, he assures himself he’s earned this prize. A wise predator must reap the reward.
Remembering he is, in fact, in the thick of a hunt, he looks up, happy to see the girl’s trembling fingertips releasing the broken chalk into its metal pen.
He approaches the green slate, licking his lips. Hungry. He imagines salty fries as his twinkling eyes shuffle from the girl’s slumped frame to the numbers dancing behind her. His tongue swirls to the peak of his lips, ready to descend — when he sees what she’s done.
She had made many errors. But they were faded scars, covered with crisp white lines that exhibited the problem in logical folds. Following the beautiful curves of her 3s, 6s, and 9s, his eyes flow to the bottom of the board, where the solutions (3, 9) and (−2, −1) are underlined with bold waves.
He had misjudged the girl, who now stood straight, a wry smile on her thin pink lips. He sees she is a sorceress, white powder falling from her palms, a magical elixir on her brow. He had been tricked.
Reluctantly, he concedes defeat, but the sharp clang of the bell drowns out his surrender. Students flee the classroom in a panic, racing toward the lunchroom, where they will undoubtedly enjoy juicy burgers and fries. The curly-haired girl doesn’t look back. She grabs her textbook before shuffling into the crowd, her anklet hanging sloppily above her shoe.
The predator sulks to his desk. Beneath it, he sees his dirty red lunch pail, a stinking green salad hidden inside its metal jaws. Just before he flips open the rusted clasp, a thought emerges. He still teaches tenth-grade math in thirty minutes. He can wait until then. A good predator won’t make the same mistake twice.
He leans back in his creaky black chair, eager for the hunt to begin.
Chelsea Nelthropp 2025 - A version of The Hunt was originally published in The Lark.
Another good one, Chelsea! This story made me think of Gaza. Rivers of discarded shoes, or piles of them, in the case of the Nazis, are terrifying, evocative images. What could be if they were in classrooms, learning! What a mastery write!
It makes a lot of sense to talk about it in terms of predator and prey in this context. This reminds me of a mean math teacher I had myself.