In Geology class she learned that it takes a spate of virulent
components to trigger a global extinction event. Not a celestial collision, nor
climate change is sufficient enough alone to achieve this. It takes behavior as well: how a species will
collectively choose to respond to such crises will ultimately decide their
fate.
***
The oscillating red and blue lights from
the police cruiser washed over her dejected face in grim sequence. Megan let that
flashing glare burn across her eyes, wishing it could burn away her memories. They
gave her a blanket. She was confused by this gesture but she took it anyway.
She was trembling fiercely, but it had nothing to do with the cold. Even as the
sun was waning the air was still quite balmy. Fear put the chill in her. The
blanket could do nothing to assuage that. Some primitive part of her mind
compelled her to throw the blanket over her head, wrapping it taught around her
shoulders. Under here the monsters can’t
get me. She relaxed on the rear bumper of an ambulance and she hid beneath
it, wanting to die. The cruel irony was that only a few hours ago she almost
had.
Her peers were streaming this way and that.
They floated by her like phantoms from some awful dream. It was all so very
surreal. Police took information on clipboards, stoically. Kids clustered together
bawling in each other’s arms. Some were blithely watching, smiling and taking
selfies. Megan could only sit there absently. She couldn’t hear a thing. The
uncertain staccato bursts were still trapped in her ears. A storm of emotion
was clutching at her heart, but she swallowed it down, turning sickly in her
effort.
An officer walked her fretful mother and
father at last to meet her. They broke from him and seized Megan hard into
their grateful embrace. Her mother wailed woefully in her ear. That hurt some,
but it snapped the girl back to her unfortunate present, and for a moment those
horrible sounds were not repeating on her mind. A detective spoke a few words
with her father before they were permitted to leave. He told him, “If she can
remember anything else, just give me a call.” Megan only wanted the night to go
away from her memory forever.
The drive home was long, quiet, and
unnerving. Flashes of the boy’s anguished, terrible hatred flashed again over
Megan’s eyes and she gasped. It was the first sign of life they got form their
daughter since leaving the crime scene. Her mother turned to look back at her, startled.
She asked if she was all right.
“Of course she isn’t all right,” her father decided before bewailing some other dark
conflictions. “The school should have had some way to prevent this,” he said.
“And how did he get those weapons? I tell you how, because those gun-rights advocates
rule the country and our elected representatives don’t do anything about it,
and…” on and on it went. He would conclude his harangue talking about how “that kid was mental,” and that he was an
“evil piece of—.” Her father—high in
his passions—was just one choice phrase after the next. It took some time for
her mother to finally make the only sensible proclamation since the brutal
car-ride had begun, “Let us not talk about this anymore.”
Megan was silent until they were home. She
walked through the door, and then she froze. Her mother and father watched her.
They stood tentatively at the threshold, not knowing what they could possibly
do to ease her trauma. Without looking back at them Megan said in a poignant
voice, “Thank you for picking me up, I…I
think I’m gonna go to bed, now.”
“Do you need us…” his wife put a firm hand against
his shoulder to shut him up. They let her go.
Megan slipped quietly into her bathroom. It
was all for her. Mom and Dad thought she was at the age now, she would need her
own place to decompress and do her teenage-girl stuff. She mostly used it to
shower, put on her makeup, and have a private place to chat about boys with her
girlfriends on the phone. She looked at her sallow, dispirited expression in
the mirror. Her flaxen hair fell in lazy ropes, sticky with dry hairspray, and
hanging in clumps of misery down her shoulders. She had dark lines running from
her eyes where her eyeliner had fallen apart from a cascade of tears. Her hands
were still trembling. In her reflection she remembered Daddy’s little girl. Her parents thought she was an angel: the same
girl who won every horseback-riding award in Four H, and smiled prettily, and
respectfully at all of her elders. But she was sixteen. And she was not that
innocent anymore. Her parents never got to know that part of her—how she was
with her friends. But the mirror knew.
The mirror saw her and her friends ruthlessly
hectoring Scott Sanders before he did what he did. They berated him for being a
creep, ugly, and poor. They regarded him with disgust and disparagement at
every opportunity. He was so strange with his pasty skin, saturnine
disposition, and choppy black hair. They suggested that he should kill himself on social media. They spit
in his food at lunch. Together with her girls
they fed on his despair like a pack of malicious wolves. They didn’t see it
like that though; it was all just kid shenanigans. The mirror saw it for what
it really was.
Scott brought the gun in; it was one of
those scary kinds. Where he got it, how he got it: those were questions that
did not matter to her. What is he going
to do with that thing? That was her only concern. He sprayed the classroom
with bullets, unrelenting. It all happened so fast. Scott found her cowering
under a desk. He looked at her. She saw his morbid pimply, starved face in that
mirror. Pools of blood puddled underneath him. The survivors were screaming
down the hall, their voices receding as they went. They were the only two left.
He fell to his knees, glaring at her. Megan remembered whimpering, and begging.
But he never put the gun on her. Instead, he set the smoldering barrel under
his own chin, reaching awkwardly for the rifle’s trigger. He said, “This is what
you wanted?”
“Scott, I’m sorr—.”
She threw her shaking hands over her face
and howled when the gun thundered. Fire ignited under the kid’s jaw, shattering
it in a blow that surged violently through his skull.
Megan was suddenly screaming in the mirror as
she had done then, and her parents were at the bathroom door trying to get in.
They could not. It was locked. She was only a teenager doing teenage-girl
stuff. Still, their little girl lamented at her own reflection, “I hate you!” And then she thought
darkly, you should kill yourself…
She wished it was only a dream. In a
fiction it could have been, in some clever twist, some trick of the conscience that
would teach her the fault in her ways and change her for the better. But this was
real life. This happened. And she will never forget. And she will never forgive
herself. And on and on it goes…
***
Pointing blame is an easy thing to do. But
in the end if we do nothing about ourselves, and our archaic, tribalistic ways,
we will fall just like our ill-fated progenitors before us had. Extinction is
only a few more bad decisions away. Its seed rooted by the reflection in the
mirror.
Author’s commentary:
I am not a saint.
I have done some awful things in my life
that I regret, some that I torture myself over. I did a lot of dumb shit for a punch
line. I used to think I was being funny, but I have gown to learn that I—like
most in our culture—am just very sick. I have teased, I have gossiped, and
ridiculed, and laid blame on everything and everyone that wasn’t in my own
reflection. I don’t pretend to know all the answers; sometimes our arrogance
can trick us into believing we are smarter than we truly are, or well prepared
for whatever the world can throw at us. But we are not. I recognize that many
refuse to see bullying as an epidemic, and I truly do not believe that it can
be the only factor in this situation, but to deny it is a problem in our
culture is just dangerous. I draw caricatures for a living and I get to sit
with young people a lot. They pretend I don’t exist as they gossip cruelly
about every one of the young locals that they know; they can get ugly. But they
shrug it off insouciantly as if it were nothing more than simple locker-room talk. I do not like this new
trend. It is worrisome. It is terrifying.
I don’t like talking about such topics, but sometimes having
some kind of commentary—any at all—is better than being shocked, thoughts and
prayers, and then going right back to pretending it never happened just to have
it happen again and again the next month. As a kid Columbine frightened me, and
9/11 scarred my soul. We will never understand the sort of trauma this new
generation is facing on the daily. Self identity crisis, self-worth,
disillusionment, trolling, hatred, murder, suicide, mass shootings, shaming, sex,
lies, corruption, pollution, war, divide, destruction: our environment is
poisoned by our behavior, and we expect our children to know better somehow.
Our very President is a goddamn salacious provocateur reality-show-star troll,
who is beloved by many—god help us all. There isn’t much I can do about any of
this, but I can reflect on it at least. I’ve learned that some of the problem
is in myself, and knowing its there I can perhaps start doing healthier things,
thinking healthier thoughts, to try and remedy it. That said this was my story
on the matter.
My intent in this story is to show many
levels of tribal-like affect on the bitterly disputed, egregious subject of
school-shootings: partisan politicians who fight for gun-advocates that spin
gun rights grossly for their own gain, and do nothing to try to prevent a heinous
act from happening again. Shortsighted civilian perspective who only include
facts that support their arguments. Parents who are far too busy in their own
lives to pay close enough attention to how poisonous society is molding their
children. How differently kids act when their own social tribes are influencing
them, and young people coming up in a world where divisiveness is just a
regular part of modern culture. And then I had to narrow it all down to 1000
words to try and meet the restrictions of a flash fiction article that was
calling for submissions. As you can tell I added much more since deciding to
keep the piece for myself. The story was written exclusively to match their
guidelines and theme. It was rejected of course, and since I don’t think I want
to use if for anything else, and because I think some conclusions suggested in
the story I thought were important to reflect on, I figured I’d just post it to
my blog. Thanks for reading!
Original Entry Guidelines:
(short short version)
We’re happy to announce the theme of our next special issue:
Stories for Dead People. Though morbid it may seem, we think it allows writers
to send in ghosts, and zombies, which is always fun, but it also opens the door
to a celebration of some fallen heroes. And we hope it will encourage some of
you to get angry, the way we get angry every time there’s another school
shooting or another police shooting or another needless killing of people not
given the protection they deserver. It’s a broad canvas. There are a lot of
dead people out there, a lot of stories to tell.
