"The School" by Donald Barthelme (1974)

Now I'm thinking about Donald Barthelme again (and am struggling not to just find links for every story in Sixty Stories and rec every single one individually), so here's another short-short of his that I love. I still refuse to make the main link the New Yorker's page (with its dumb video planted, profanely, right in the middle of two paragraphs near the end), but this Electric Lit page also includes a nice introduction that concludes, correctly, with this:

"To describe it is to sound ridiculous: a very funny story about death and the negation of meaning, and the only story ever written, by anyone, in which a resurrected gerbil is the bringer of hope."