Reflection

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.