wildscape. literary journal

Casey is one of our featured writers for Issue 7. Below is his short story, and beneath that, a series of questions and responses between Casey and our Interview & Feature writer, Angela Heiser.

Jesus in Seventh Period Is Concerned
About Immigration Agents
by Casey McConahay

He talks to me after class one day. He says they came to the country years ago, but he’s not sure that that’s important. They’re taking anyone, he tells me. They see your skin. That’s all that matters. He says his friends have seen the agents in our city. Their big black vehicles, he says. We know it’s them.

            I’ve seen them too—their Ford Explorers. They sometimes drive through the suburbs. I say to Jesus, Please be careful. These are dangerous times. 

            I can’t just stay at home, he says.
            I say, Why can’t you?
            He says, You know why.
            I say, Right. I say, Okay.

                                                                       .	.	.

He is brilliant—Jesus—but there are many better students. He doesn’t study for his quizzes. He misspells words in every essay. Grades aren’t that important to him, but he listens during class and likes to think and learn and argue. We read an Orwell essay—the one about the hanging—and he debates Leonard Dalton. An eye for an eye, Leonard tells us, and Jesus, who has his arms crossed, says that vengeance is barbaric. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, Jesus tells him, and when Leonard says that no one stones anyone to death anymore, Jesus says Leonard should do some research about forms of capital punishment.

            Leonard is on the trivia team. You should see how red his face gets.

                                                                       .	.	.

He finds me in the hallway Monday. He says they bought an empty warehouse, and that’s the place they’ll take their captives. He says they’ve done that in other cities. He says he thinks he’d like to protest. Please don’t do that, I say to Jesus. You’ll put a target on your back. He says, They’re taking people there. I say, I know that. He says, They’re locked inside there. Yes, I say. I know.

                                                                       .	.	.

I don’t know where he was born. I think his father might still live there. His mother married a second time, and Jesus likes that man he tells me. He says he only calls him dad and never stepdad. His mom has dark skin just like Jesus. She came to conferences one year. I didn’t have him yet. She passed me in the commons. She looked so beautiful. Her hair was black and long.

                                                                       .	.	.

Midway through a class that week, he puts his hand in the air and keeps it up until I notice. Jesus? I say to Jesus because I think he knows the answer. We’ve been talking about a Housman poem—the one about the runner. I ask what shoulder high means, but Jesus says he doesn’t know that. How can people pretend they’re kind, he asks me, when they’re cruel toward the vulnerable? How can anyone think they’re moral when they do that?

            I try to think of ways to answer, but it’s not something I’ve given thought to. That’s a question for Mr. Henderson, I tell him. (Larry teaches sociology.) Then I say, Shoulder high it says. Do we have guesses?

            Carter Mitchell says the man might not be tall.

                                                                       .	.	.

You can call on Jesus, sure, but he won’t answer you directly. He’ll tell a story. Jesus likes to speak in riddles. You’ll get confused. You’ll wish you’d called on someone else.

                                                                       .	.	.

He says his mother wants to leave but doesn’t know where they would go yet. We don’t have passports, Jesus tells me. I think that Joe has one, he says, so he could go somewhere I guess, but he won’t leave us. I say, Some countries have asylum. He says, Yes. My mother looked. I say, I’d be afraid to leave—to start all over. He says, We did it once already, so we know.

                                                                       .	.	.

We talk about him in the teachers’ lounge. Mrs. Lerner, who teaches history, says he aces her exams and knows much more about world history than she does. Mr. Anderson (biology) says Jesus sometimes mentions Darwin—that he admires him: that Jesus chose him for a project. He got an A on it, Mike tells us. It was good.

            Every teacher likes him.

            Last September when we were dating, Allison, his counselor, said they met about his coursework. He thought he’d like to go to college he told her, and she asked what he thought he’d study. He’d not decided yet, she told me, but he thought maybe education. I said, The pay though. She said, Yes I know. I told him. But Jesus said he thought he’d like it. He called it noble.

            I said, Yikes.

            He mentioned you, she said. Not just you. You and others. He said he wants to bring some goodness to the world.

                                                                        .	.	.

They tried to get inside a school one day—a school a few blocks over. They came in the masks. They had their vests on. They had handguns someone said. 

            Imagine dragging frightened students out of classrooms. Adults with guns.

            We’re told to keep our students safe.

                                                                       .	.	.

He reads things I’ve not assigned him. Lots of Steinbeck. Margaret Atwood. He said he didn’t like Inferno. (It was strange.)

            I notice what he’s reading sometimes. This month, just religious texts. The Upanishads. The Bible. When he comes with the Koran, I say I read it years ago, and, Do you like it? I ask. Jesus tells me, So far. It reads like poetry, he tells me, which is true.

            Jesus reads a favorite sura to me. 

            He tells me all these books are beautiful.

                                                                       .	.	.

I wish you could hear his laughter. His laugh is better than anyone’s.

                                                                       .	.	.

He says that religious beliefs are important, sure—that if you’re a religious, practicing prayer is important, and loving God is important. Sure you should love God, he says, but shouldn’t you also love others—love the people you encounter? He says, Religious people skip that. Loving others. Helping others.

            Angie who sits in the front of the classroom asks him, What does that have to do with semi-colons?

                                                                       .	.	.

The agents are going everywhere. They aren’t just here. They’re in each city. You see the stories on the news at night—the people that they take. They just go missing. Some get sent to other countries. There’ve been shootings. There was footage. People died.

                                                                       .	.	.

The last time I see Jesus, he says he had a premonition. I know they find me, Jesus tells me. I know they take me in a van. I know they drive me to a building. There are cells there. You don’t know that, I tell Jesus. You’re just worried. Just stay calm. He says, It happens all the time. I’m just preparing. I say, I don’t think they would take you. You’re a child.

                                                                       .	.	.

Mrs. Corrigan, his choir teacher, says his voice is like an angel’s.

                                                                       .	.	.

One day, his desk is empty. The other student haven’t noticed.

            Where is Jesus at? I ask them.

            Doug says Jesus rides his bus. But was he on today? I ask.

            Doug isn’t certain. I had my headphones in, Doug says. I fell asleep.

                                                                       .	.	.

The truth—if I’m being honest—is that we do have favorite students. 

            There are three kinds of students, really. Some students, when they’re absent, we don’t notice that they’re missing. And some we notice, but we’re glad when they’re not present.

            Some of our students, when they’re absent, we really miss them.

            Jesus is the third kind.

                                                                       .	.	.

No one knows what’s happened to him. Leslie in the attendance office called his house, but no one answered. She says she drove that way last Thursday. The lights were out at eight oclock. She says they might have moved away, but she’s not certain. She’ll ask the neighbors next time. Maybe they’ll know more.

                                                                       .	.	.

Here’s what I want you to know about Jesus:

            That he is brave and kind and honest. That he asks to read in class.  That when he writes by hand, the letters all look scribbly. He is part of our community. He’s funny. He is smart. 

            There’s not a place in this America for Jesus. For someone good like he is. Pure like him and good.

                                                                       .	.	.

I dream about him sometimes. That he comes back to my class. He’s sometimes bleeding in my dreams but sometimes isn’t. And he sits down, and he just sits there. I ask some questions. Jesus waits. And then I ask another question, and he answers. Something clever. Just like always. Jesus grins.

            It’s nice to imagine that—that he’ll come back to my classroom. 

            I don’t believe that will happen though.

            I don’t believe in anything.

Interview with Casey

Angela: The urgency of this piece needs no explanation. In this age of masked men tearing Latine families apart, we often feel as bystanders our options are limited to protest, exercising our free speech, recording and documenting and making donations to organizations stepping in to help. I am in awe at your skill in crafting a narrative to humanize at the precipice of inhumane. How do you engage with the news and create art from it and avoid letting it devour you? 

Casey: Truthfully, the news does devour me. Since November 2024, almost everything I’ve written has addressed events in our country. Art and literature can be an escape from the realities of the world of course, but I’ve been looking to art to help me navigate this moment in history—both through the art that I consume and through the work that I create.


Angela: What does this look like for you off of the page and in your community? Which organizations/charities/individuals working to aid Latine communities should our readers know more about? How and where can they get involved?

Casey: I live in a rural community that’s largely conservative, largely homogeneous. It’s been relatively untouched by the policing that’s occurring in larger cities. 

I’m close to Fort Wayne, Indiana, and an organization called Fuerza Unida (Instagram: @fuerzaunidafw) is doing great work in that city. It’s supporting citizens in targeted communities, providing education and resources to the public, and also organizing community activities: concerts, World Cup watch parties. In a better society, these are things we’d look to our government to accomplish—not community volunteers.

Similar organizations are operating in many cities, which is incredible. We’re fortunate to have so many dedicated and courageous people serving our communities.


Angela: The Orwell essay mentioned at the beginning has a line that I sat with for a bit and considered the ties to ICE raids, specifically: “It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man.” The fictional students Leonard and Jesus are of two minds about the message of the essay, but Jesus asserts “vengeance is barbaric.” What can we as civilians and bystanders do to counter this barbarism destroying conscious persons of all ages?

Casey: In the essay, Orwell never mentions the crime that the condemned man has been accused of, which is deliberate of course. What matters to Orwell—and what he insists that readers recognize as well—is the condemned man’s humanity.

What can we be doing? I think that many people of conscience are trying to answer that question. I don’t know that I have the answer. But we can start by recognizing the humanity of others—by seeing their goodness, their individuality, their value.


Angela: Teachers in the USA are notoriously underpaid and grapple with high demands from admin, parents, behavior problems and then are also charged with “keeping the kids safe.” What can you tell us about the significance of your choice to show a teacher-student relationship versus situating the story elsewhere? 

Casey: I’m an educator. I teach high school English. The world that the story inhabits is very much my world. 

I’ve had students from many ethnic, cultural, and racial backgrounds. Students of different sexual orientations and gender identities. Early in my teaching career, I was asked whether it bothered me to have students whose experiences and identities are sometimes so different than mine. I said no—it didn’t: that if I was bothered by my students’ backgrounds, I wouldn’t be very good at my job. 

I still believe that—that it’s my responsibility to care about each student who enters my classroom. And if an educator can’t do that—if they have biases that prevent them from doing that—then they’re in the wrong profession.


Angela: Your discussion of safety really resonated with me. We recently had Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett complaining about her Kevlar vest and explaining it to her child while so many children are put in harm’s way with no armor, and a flimsy American explanation that “there’s just no way to prevent this.” And it goes back to Jesus in the narrative living a very different life than his classmates who get to put headphones on in the bus and not even notice he’s gone. Who gets to define safe? (It’s never the ones who are doing the safe keeping.)

Casey: The first time I was in a school for an active shooter drill, I was student-teaching. It was terrifying. Now, we do these drills so frequently that they’ve become routine. They’re performed as regularly as fire or tornado drills, but they aren’t really the same thing. We can’t prevent tornadoes from forming. We shouldn’t treat school shootings as if they’re similarly unavoidable. 

There’s also a wide gulf between real danger and imagined dangers. The fears that are dictating so much of American policy are largely imagined—deeply xenophobic fears about people of color causing harm to white families, which are ideas that are being actively amplified by voices within the current administration. Meanwhile, unregulated government agents are killing unarmed civilians in our cities and in detention centers. The dangers that those agents pose seem far more legitimate, far more immediate.


Angela: There’s a quote in your piece where the counselor, Allison, tells you “he wants to bring some goodness to the world.” And this line just sits with me like a dying flame, but we can’t let it! Don’t let this hope, however tiny, die too. Don’t we all want this for students and the next generation, for them to want to spread their personal goodness around? What goodness do you witness or wish to highlight here?

Casey: In my classroom, I’m fortunate to witness so many small acts of kindness and courage. Sometimes it’s a student sharing a difficult experience or an unpopular opinion during class discussion. Sometimes it’s something a student writes in a journal entry or in a personal narrative. Sometimes it’s a student finding the strength to come to school each day. (For some students, that’s incredibly difficult.) But students—children and young adults—can find the strength to do these things, and if they’re capable of such courage, then surely we are too.


Angela: Your final line accomplishes so much in five words. This evocative nihilism and disillusionment is at once sharp and understated as an ending. And it resonates with me as a reader because the barrage of bad news like this leaves me feeling similarly. My question to you is, what helps you hold onto your faith in the goodness of humanity? How do you succeed in holding onto hope, and nurturing it, even if some days it’s a mere glimmer? 

Casey: I’m religious. Religion—in our country, Christianity in particular—has become politicized in dangerous ways. Our vice-president argues Catholic doctrine with the Vatican for example. But to me, Christianity is Jesus saying (in a story told in three Gospels) that the most important commandments are to love God and to love others. Christianity is Jesus telling his disciples, “A new commandment I give you: love one another.” My faith—as I understand it—commands me to love others and to behave compassionately toward them, and that moral imperative guides the person I try to be. 

A person can certainly find that moral guidance outside of religion by the way. Approaching my days with moral clarity—and letting that guide my behavior as best I’m able—has been important for me, but I don’t know that the belief system that shapes one’s morality is particularly important.


Angela: Which teacher really saw you the way this narrator saw Jesus? What would you say to them if you had the chance today?

Casey: I’m answering these questions in Thailand. I’m in Thailand because my third grade teacher, Bonnie Jones, had us write about a place we’d like to visit one day, and I chose Thailand. 

Mrs. Jones had reading competitions, a class spelling bee. My interests in language and literature largely began in her class. Some of my high school English teachers—Keith Langdon and Pam Switzer—were excellent as well. And I had some great university instructors too—Elizabeth Renker, Alan Farmer, Manuel Martinez, Jim Heynen, Jacquelyn Mitchard. I want to be sure to name as many great teachers as possible.

A few years ago, I tried to write to Mrs. Jones, but I found out that I’d waited too long unfortunately. It’s important to communicate our gratitude when we have an opportunity to, isn’t it?


Angela: What would you say to teachers with students going through this with Jesus right now?

Casey: When a student comes to me about anything that they’re experiencing, I’m very grateful. Grateful for the trust that they put in me. Grateful that they feel safe enough to share their challenges with me. I have a responsibility to help them as best I’m able, but it’s important to also know when I’m not able to help students myself. I don’t have the training necessary to help a student through a serious mental health crisis for example. I can’t assist a student who doesn’t have a place to sleep. Fortunately, I’ve worked with excellent guidance counselors who have the training—and the access to a network of resources—that I lack. Supporting a student doesn’t necessarily mean doing it on one’s own. Often it means helping a student find resources that you yourself aren’t able to provide. 


Angela: Where can we read more of your work and support you? What plans do you have for the rest of 2026?

Casey: I have another story slated for publication soon. Some of my previous work can be found online. I’m hammering away on a larger project that touches on some of the subjects we’ve discussed today.

I’m always writing something.

about the author // Casey McConahay

Casey McConahay’s work has appeared in December, Beloit Fiction, and Southern Humanities Review. He lives in northwest Ohio.

Instagram: @casey.mcconahay