Six balls kept in a knotted net

A fourth grader spends four full minutes untangling the drawstring before recess starts, working the knot with the concentration usually reserved for shoelaces, while six red rubber balls wait inside the bag's diamond mesh, pressed into unequal shapes by whichever ball ended up on the bottom of the equipment closet. The bag itself is nylon cord knotted into a grid wide enough to see through but tight enough to hold, cinched at the mouth by a single cord that has been replaced at least twice, judging by the two different shades of white braided into the current one. It carries no label, no size markings, no indication of which grade it belongs to, and travels between classrooms on a rotation with no schedule posted anywhere, arriving and leaving on a logic the fourth graders track more reliably than the staff. Inside, the balls take on the bag's shape rather than the reverse: flattened slightly where the mesh presses in, a faint diamond pattern visible on the rubber after a season of storage. Emptied, the bag collapses into something the size of a fist and disappears into a supply closet shelf until the next recess calls for it, at which point it is filled again, cinched again, carried out under one arm like something more valuable than six dollars of rubber and cord would suggest. Nobody has measured how many times a given bag makes the walk from closet to blacktop and back in a single school year, though the fraying at the cinch point, thinned to almost nothing on the oldest bags, offers a rough answer.

Marion Vale