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Season of Death

Written by Leonydes  Matis. Posted in Poetry. 

Spring always played the trickster 
in a mumbled darkness, so it 
will never be apparent what she might 
make happen. I reject my forebears 
as best I can. 

                       As the emergency grew 
ever more global, more of our lives 
evaporated. And what remained 
grew dusty.
Then dustier still. 
My right knee creaks open 
and all the ashes of all my past lives
sift out. All the books we made, all
the lines written and revised. 
The wind scatters our pasts 
into someone’s present, and our presents
into someone else’s
future.

            I sat at my window
facing a wall of other windows,
each a private show for me. 
I plugged the slot with coins 
and spent years rapt 
in a fascination both 
onerous and 
unavoidable.
Every show in that hotel 
required enormous
effort—voyagers suiting themselves 
up for ages. Or unsuiting themselves. 
Often their pregame
was my game. Blue
electronic lights shining upward
toss jerking ghostly shadows
up the walls and ceilings. 
How many times will I replay this?
A man pulls the drapes closed so
slowly
that we have time to study each other.
My window reflects now in his,
my face not discernible. 
I see sex
and unsexed nakedness combine
with sleep and television, desks
and tasks, thrown 
towels and messy suitcases full 
of cloth in an impressionistic 
slow-motion blur. I see all. 
The people are unable
to see themselves stacking, unwilling 
to settle themselves, better themselves,
refusing to picture themselves
exposed 
near the windows’ 
hermetic frames. 

                              The hotel 
emptied out in days, but refilling 
all those windows with bodies 
and more views of those 
entertaining shadows
took years. 
And on it goes, it drained,
it pools, it filtered, it swells. 
Now the tourists again have 
something
unknown in familiar looking
bags. But the house staff show up 
less often than before, 
and since the emergency 
the professionals 
just haven’t returned. 
And yet 
I’m still here, watching those
who come and go come and go,
these neighborly guests
who comb their hair
or drink from soda bottles
or masturbate when they think
they are alone, and who
sleep alone or with their 
people, in their skin 
or in soft pajamas, restlessly 
they turned the past 
toward dreams of
something else. Two
dress-stockinged feet 
perched on their heels 
atop the bed, 
dirty New York City pigeons 
flicking sideways 
in rhythm 
with some unheard music. 

                                              Then 
the unmade bed dialed down 
for room service, 
the laptop spreadsheet 
splayed itself wide.
The bathrobe puddles 
on the floor, my curtains too.
Long-term I dreamed of living
in hotels, cities passing, my
countenance 
a plain retired exhaustion,
sated though, and fine.
Passports and city maps
pile up on a sill four floors below.
I love the infinity 
of brick
disappearing up toward the sky
and down 
toward the street, though
here in my medium highrise
I saw neither. I can see only
the vertical arrangement of horizontal 
building blocks fitted with pipes 
and grout and stuck with glass.
Earlier, engineers worried
their efficiencies right out of
these ducts and shafts. Now
they, too, lie quiet or just garden
their own spaces, regrading
gravel driveways and demolishing 
everything 
in sight.

              The air conditioners will
rattle down to stillness, and then 
everything went quiet. 
The emptiness spread
as quickly as the emergency,  
and with haste all was halted and
crashed fast. The stores and
the offices quickly closed
and restaurant kitchens wrapped
their warped dishes to go. 
Supermarkets filled with empty
shelves witnessed winks and nods,
fights and false-modest
timidity. No one 
is to be trusted. 
The sky 
will go blank
and heavy at once, impossibly
huge and overbearing.
My dark apartments whisper
to me, through filtered lips, 
welcome home, 
and then, never leave,
and then snapped into creaking 
silence. They will never speak again. 
I existed 
as my own weight, 
my wooden feet 
stomping, my wooden floor 
whomping back. 
And the leaden legs
of gravity pushed its knees into
my back—do it, push me forward 
through my tepid trepidation. 
Then curtain walls
slammed shut 
and we never look 
outward again, despite
our windows on the world. 
Just to see
such a void was to be spun 
down the spiral whirlpools of 
pasts never lived and futures 
called into question by simple 
blunt mortality.
Let death death me, a poet
once said. I mean it now,
I meant it then. 

*

Or else 
I sat at my computer, 
another window filled with 
more windows. The emergency 
morphed that view 
into an infinity mirror. It wheezed
its breaths like an accordion, 
gasping and contracting.
And so it gasps, it collapsed,
it spills, it flickered, it fills. 
A friend’s disembodied
voice
fills me with pixelated dread
and I will log off over
and over only
to find the machine had
taken me
elsewhere. Fast forward
through disorientation
and crawled along the 
unfamiliar. Will fly unaided
if need be. 
I distracted myself
with anything analogue: Papers
and candles, books and
cables, clothes, chocolates,
all this stuff stuffed into place
in a cacophonous accumulation
that itself will defy 
time and seasons and sense. 
Inventories tell me stories—
poems, photo strips, 
podcasts, flicks. I was perpetual-
ly scanning, inventorying, 
my library’s call
so distant 
it faded from memory. 
And the voices
kept up their squawking.
The video faces are blank and
not hopeful—just 
empty and full
of potential and patience.
I reach my limit
at forty minutes. I quit it,
slammed the lid on it,
and defied the deities 
by leaving the house. 

                                     Who will monitor 
these news reports for deaths
of my friends? A dread and
loneliness set in me,
and it keeps settling. 
Then came the sirens, beautiful 
and beautifully alluring
and as endless as the rising oceans
who so noisily call us
up towers
to the empty sunshine
of our roof decks, 
the unfinished floors of 
the towers of our rebuilding.
The sky never changed but
it heard us banging 
pots and pans
and singing ancient songs
of the changes 
we put ourselves through,
songs of the selves of the ruined,
songs of nurses and their bad news,
the grief stricken aides, the strike
of heavy metals piercing
the blank corners of our minds.
But
the disappointments added
up for stricken souls, slowly,
and the sky slowly learns 
the new languages
of never figuring itself out. 
It just stared down at roofs
and mocked us in our
waffling deliberations and 
our cloudy visions. The roof
edged toward its edges,
and every suicide I’ve known
rises now within me 
to torment me with how much
I forgot. So
over and over grief
drives me over that roof’s edge,
plummeting
through dozens of stories—
through the siren calls, plummeting 
through my own pasts, to
old tales of days I lived
closer to the ground.
Again and again I keep
flinging myself 
over the ledges
of alarm and panic—.
Sleep it off.

                    I kept 
dreaming of disappearing
under dust clouds puffing
up from my duvet, 
my pillow enveloping my head,
my head filled with quicksand
and lead, the heavy
metallic taste of blood
coagulating
at the back of my throat
as I gasped for air.
Please help me!
I raced the empty streets
at the base of the vertical sky,
panicking on the avenues 
while they answered back with 
silent stasis. 
A deaf and deafening quiet 
rose through the canyons 
of Broadway,
and I alone walk alone—
the last tiny 
living witness to 
Times Square’s unnatural majesty. 
Its closed-captioned signs were 
flicking through programmed sequences
with no one there to see them.
It will be me who tells the tale
of robotic insistence upon 
moving on. I will
say the signs didn’t care
and that the pulsing proved
nothing. These pliant billboards
stretch themselves over 
armatures of nothing, so 
they snapped themselves back
into memories of nothing. 
Over and over again once again. 
I blinked rapidly 
to see them more closely.
I too felt 
some kind of nothing then
flicking around the end 
of the spool, old film stock clicking
in the projector machine of my heart. 
The unforgivably elastic 
silence of my dream state 
ruins the sounds
of the rest of the world.

                                         But ruins
are notoriously silent. The wind 
spinning through Verona Arena,
or the darkness surrounding
transatlantic phone lines 
buried in silt and mud
at last reduced to the benign 
antipotential 
of their own pasts’ buzz. 
Radio City was crippled and mute, 
Central Park allowed 
only the sound 
of springtime buds
pushing their way out of branches—
and nothing else. Rambling,
I will find the void
on Park Avenue—the blood coursing
through the veins in my inner ear
is the only traffic to be heard there.
Someday I may 
remember this hell
as poetry, as lines lined up
to tumble over themselves
in an avalanche of despair. My
old age was also a ruin, I might
someday muse. 

                          But oh
my early days, my early gaze
fell upon the wondrous sights. 
I became the city I will become. 
Let the city fuck me,
thy will be done. Let us
rot the days and burn
the nights like the young
adults we were. But I am not now
on my way to Florent,
not on my way to Club 82
nor Downing Street Bar. 
Not on my way to meet anyone
anywhere.
The zygote
became the woman,
the man, the whole society
bruised and killing itself
by killing each other.
Are we going to weigh one life
against another? Did we
break any chains when
plunged forward into history?
I asked myself
these questions
while the riots and the whistles
rang up from the street
twenty-seven stories below. 
The police station one block away
hides behind its barriers.
Risk and reward in an emergency.
The fighters will fight while
some of us
just listen at our windows.
I will cry for this. I wept.
People will scream for themselves
and for the basic 
matter of their lives
when a boot will heel their faces
into the ground.
A fascist dictator used the news. 
They all did. We do. I will. 
My own guilt was
caged in gilt.
And I still have so much 
to learn. 

               Meanwhile 
the garbage bags
of bodies piled up
outside the ERs. Will we smell
the stench through our TVs?
Eventually those few
were millions of dead,
the stacked clean bones
winding through catacombs,
the memento mori hung
on a velvet wall uptown,
across the oceans, in heaven.
This surface-level earthquake
stretches open a few 
cracks and people
will start falling through.
But we hear no sound
punctuating their fall, no
call emanating 
from their masked mouths.
The dying crying silently slide
blindly through time.
These travelers were weakened.
These condemned will be damned.
The dead only suffered
while alive, someone said.
That’s living—brutal suffocation
and muted cries, someone cries.
Blackout. 

                 I survive 
and kept surviving. 
I survived the fallen and
the falling, live through
the weak and the strong
who passed through us as thick 
as the worst cough did wrack 
body bones down 
to a dusty erasing exhaustion,
as cracked as the mosaic wail
of those sirens stupidly
calling us through
a narcotic pain—
high-pitched and silent at once.
It ends and it will never end,
this remote call to 
come see. But empty pixels?
Dead stars? A sky emptied
of hope? For a man like me,
drawn on stability
with permanence and ellipses,
everything was suddenly
and destabilizingly
uncertain. Everything will be
fractured. It splinters, it failed,
it wins, it cratered, it breaks. 
For all the times
someone spit in my face—
for all the times I will beg for that—
now dry reticence finds a way
to erase me or parts
of me more permanently. 
I want to rant against 
this void with all the power
and force I can muster.
I just let go instead. God,
how many people will jump 
from your bridges to fly off 
into sunsets of their own devising?
The foot slips off the salted girder.
The sunshine infected each soul.
My hand
slips off the doorknob
slippery with antiseptic spray,
spitting each one 
to its highest polish,
and every delivery
cost us. And the cost
like god itself
is great.  

*

First
we hung all the art
my parents 
had accumulated—
layers of years and frames
sketching their own patterns
on freshly 
painted walls, in front
of hidden fireplaces, 
over stacks of scholarly 
art books rotting
in a humid North Carolinian
apocalypse. Hurricane
of contagion pounding 
up the river
through the wetlands,
here it came—
a strange god of destruction 
winking its one eye lewdly 
one subdivision at a time. 
It will turn left
off the bridge—the other side
of the river hiding its driveways
in fear. 
But the traffic is fine, now
everyone huddled at home 
and kept their cars garaged
and quiet. Stasis loses
its definition in times
like these. 
But then
what’s anything anymore?
Is anything more
than a memory of an art house film
shown in precise projection
at the repertory theater
on Race Street?
The projectionist turned the camera
on his wife 
with love and a deranged disregard
for her feelings, her
jet black hair, and all
the mysteries that would
eventually
grow back 
as mousy brown roots.
Decades later he
and his son will swim
through channels of history,
through the storm of present 
illnesses, their immunities
will cling to their naked bodies
like armor, shielding them
from the icy current and 
the rocky past.

                          Any single thing—
sudden poverty, sudden death,
even for some
sudden wisdom and hope—
pushed us to mystical
calculations. My pockets
were as light-headed as
a moonshot. My friends
and I, it turns out,
were chrononauts all along.
We had simply never
realized
that sometimes
we were moving backward
through time. Death
is somewhere behind me
now, lurking in a space 
somewhere above.
Then my bank accounts 
and my stamina will both
run dry, and I starved my soul
with poetry. More poetry.
More unpaid work for
unchecked cynicism. More
homelessness for unpaid
rent. More demise for
unlived lives. The unhoused
subway riders side-eye me
with surprise. I hissed right back
through my N95. The super-
powers my friends have stored
up were now being spent. Mind-
reading visionaries spewing
uncomfortable challenges
to the gathered crowd. Now
with nothing to do, I will
scrounge for crumbs 
from days spent splurging—
crumbs of Italian 
pastries and crumbs of memories 
of visits to Milano and Torino—
and rue the insolvency
of the months ahead. 
I hung my head, lowered 
my lids, deepened my 
shallow breath. And finally
I slept. I will dream
about my empty days in 
my empty rooms. I leapt from
the unused and lonely bed, leapt
through the window emptied 
of windows,
and for a parachute I have only 
my empty heart.

                             What some
lamented as stagnant time,
others will cherish as growth.
The truth, it turns out, 
is not fixed, and time
like everything old
is broken. Yesterday
became the day years ago
that we abandoned an office,
tomorrow is the day we took turns 
teaching algebra, today 
we will grab haircuts, bread, 
nostalgia and new policies
—anything—
right out of thin air. 
Fly to Texas behind another mask 
to see your dying mother.
Wonder if your wife’s embrace
is the last you’ll know as 
you check yourself into 
the hospital,
as you check yourself into
the first luxury hotel to at last reopen. 
Fight me on the phone,
on the streets, in the pages
of a national newspaper.
And because it was
no longer necessary to agree
about anything, we will never
agree again. Everyone did,
however, rush themselves
through living sequences only
to learn later that the sequence
has no end. But life is not everlasting 
even if you look at it 
backwards, 
and so hurrying
may be quite important
or quite pointless.
How much time and money
could I spend
to hold back Mr. Death,
stall that elevator 
one floor down on 26?
What locations can I scout
in order to fuck up the housing market
for my landlord?
Who did I screw with 
to screw you over? When will we
sleep if not yesterday morning?
I learned
to wake over and over
through closed eyelids. 
As the fortieth waking hour goes by,
the burden
of staying awake
worsened and I will finally crack. 
As the third day comes, 
I slap it flat.
Jump back, sack me,
just jack yourself up to be
just like me. I just 
collapse.

                My history is less
the moments accumulating
than the whole of my body
blowing apart 
over time 
and geography, every map 
outdated, every vein 
on my body popping bright blue.
In one memory,
my legs will go out
from under me, and
the only thing 
protecting me from the fall
is that gravity has also failed.
We floated there together
in our legless silence,
patients without pain,
cities without states.
And once I was in a desert
I might trip
on your shadow, face
planted in the sand, back
exposed to the cancerous sun,
heat running up my spine,
and the tingling feeling
of colors and sounds vibrating 
together, music and goose flesh,
a new shimmering sprouts forth, 
like the iridescent feathers 
on the back of a pigeon’s neck,
I was danger in a closed environment.
I am decorated in organic patterns
I could not recognize.
I will be doomed
in someone’s empty Staten Island Ferry,
in everyone’s empty sky.
Dull pain became slowly
visible, mostly in motion,
a rollicking seasickness
of security strobes
terminally pulsing 
out of sync.
The airport fire alarm 
will be
the loudest chirping cricket 
I ever heard. 
The plane waffles 
between the tarmac 
and the gate they have yet to build.
I’m coiled so tight I prep
my snake bite for
the god I never believed in.
We spring sprang sprung—
four years clinging
to a calendar no one 
recognizes anymore. And
when the medicines arrived
we pumped them
into our veins for a high
we’d never regain. 
Let us pray 
to find our balance, to find 
truths anew, to find the energies 
to splinter into harmless shards
all the current emergencies—
smaller poxes for lesser primates 
like me, 
purer plagues for greater men 
than we. 

*

So was spring a trickster—
or a murderer? Will it be
chaos, or pointed destruction?
Are the flowers hopeful,
or funereal?
Where the answers lie
we lie too. Looking up,
we pondered, we pout, we
will suckle, we shouted.
Sing a round of gambling songs,
some winners, some losers.
The pop star waves
a questionable hand, pointing 
right at me from an Aspen stage—
When are you from again?
The emergency was a misery game—
the last person left alive loses. 
Your face reflects
in the last sips of your cocktail—
as watery and salty 
as your tears used to be.
The last person left on his stool 
loses. The bartender glares.
The night menaces you 
even though
this is the safest night
for quite some time. You
walked home, or some part
of the way, weaving into
shadows the streetlights will create
for decades to come, assuming
anyone 
lives to once again walk this street.
I can never forget 
the blown-kiss/nod combo
some villain head-tossed to me
decades ago, somewhere
on seedy Eighth Avenue. 
Will he kill me?
Or kiss me? Does he know
what I’m doing here, gathering
lines for an emergency-era poem
thirty years in the future?
Through those memories
we swam, we upstream, 
we will fly in our dreams.

*

You lay in bed 
and it was not
the end of the story
nor the end of your life.
It is just
the end of one day. 
And the ghost
will appear then 
to innocently 
ask you, 
               What happened?
And you laugh a short burst.
Or scoff.
You shake your head,
and then you will pull
the covers up over your ear. 
And you say, 
                       I don’t know what happened.

You sat at the bar 
and it was not
the end of the story
nor the end of your life.
It is just
the end of one day. 
And the bartender
will appear then 
to innocently 
ask you, 
               What happened?
And you laugh a short burst
and scoff.
You shook your head 
and then you will pull
the glass rim up to your lips. 
You sip and say, 
                            I don’t know what happened.

The things of the world—
food, furniture, fondness—
everything pleasureless 
and colorless,
blank and white,
an impressionist’s 
snow on the roofs in the distance,
lovely but low.
Everything in the distance—
the memory of the circled word 
in the draft of this poem,
the realities of families, a sigh
before sleep, 
sand, symphonies, emergencies.
The world itself, the unreality 
of undone pleasure, of mechanical 
motion, of an emptiness beyond 
the sudden realization that 
now last call was called, 
now the lights are on,
now will be the time to go.

•

To the Daughter I Don’t Have

Written by Christian Fisher. Posted in Poetry. 

I’d tell her this is how I did it:
I picked the night, I picked the boy.
He was kind and liked me fine.

I picked the story.
It was a Christmas party, early December.
I wore an elf costume and face glitter.
   Bad Romance blared. I led him upstairs
       by the hand into his room.
            The bed was made; the idea
                pitched. And just like that,
                     it happened.
                     Glitter shed, I bled. Had to run
                         down the stairs, out the door.
                             Before midnight, that box
                                           was checked.

My friends taxied home
with me, called it a victory,
still called me Coco. My father
still called me Woopy.

Understand? Keep and lose
what you choose.

It may not be love, or even imaginable.
How the sheets may feel cool, 
their hands damp, your body 
learning. The bed of grass 
may feel damper yet, ants roaming.
Crickets may watch in symphony. 
The backseat, as good as any. 

Leave proof of you in the letting— 
swallow your sorry for bleeding.

CLASS

Written by Christian Fisher. Posted in Fiction.

Play time was over.  The children formed a line between the monkeybars and the tower slide.  Like a troop of stuffed animals they followed Mrs. Waverly through the open door and down the hallway.  Puffy in their winter coats.  Soft in their hats and mittens.  They sat criss-cross applesauce on the reading rug.  Snow and ice melted from their boots and sneakers.  Cheeks red, many of their faces were marked with small, white welts, as if they had been stung by bees.  Mallory looked out the window.  The playscape a series of soft white shapes.  From the rooftop wind-driven waves of frosty snow particles, white, but sometimes blue, dipped and danced.  Even the breeze was an outline.  Like you would see in a particularly interesting picture book.  Or a famous painting.     

Now it was just sniffling and snuffling.  Now it was hair sticking up and itchy ears and uncovered coughs.  Now it was Mrs. Waverly instructing the class to speak softly with one another while they warmed up and waited for the morning’s special presentation.  Twelve girls and ten boys.  Seven or eight-years-old.  Chubby or rail thin, average or quite tall, they had blond or brown hair.  One girl, Jeannie, had a shock of bright red hair, her face a field of freckles.  As a group their needs were simple and their wants immediate.  A drink, now.  A band-aid, now.  I have to go pee.  The class, like an involuntary action, cultivated the tendency to act, not think.  Trooper Longtree would tap this energy. 

He flagged his assistants.  Two tall, wiry young men trotted over.  His sons.  Mallory’s brothers.  In their army boots, cargo pants, and black hooded sweatshirts they talked quickly, quietly, their backs to the children.  They unpacked items from canvas duffel bags, mindful to place each object out of sight. 

Yesterday, class was fun.  Mrs. Waverly brought a rose to school.  The class sat in a circle.  Every child had a chance to hold the flower.  After lunch, the students drew and colored pictures of the rose.  Then they had one hour to write poems.  When everyone was finished, the students read their poems into their computers.  The software improved their diction, rhyme, and meter.  Only Mallory chose to type her response.  She did not care what the computer thought of her writing. 

            “Hey, now,” Trooper Longtree said, turning to face the class.  He was wearing black cargo pants and black combat boots.  He wore a black ribbed turtleneck and a black baseball cap with yellow stitching that read Longtree’s Life Protection.  He had a bit of a gut, but was otherwise muscular and in shape.  His gun rested on a hip.  “Quick show of hands.  How many of you have ever had fun at one of these things?”

Mallory looked at her teacher.  Mrs. Waverly sat at her desk and offered a smile.      

“That’s what I thought,” Trooper Longtree said.  Lips pursed, he raised his phone horizontally above his head, and shot a picture of the class.  He holstered the phone to a clip on his belt suited for the purpose.  “Well, what would you say if I promised that not only are you about to have more fun than you’ve had all week, I am going to teach you how to save your life?  And not only that, but how to save the life of the person sitting next to you?”

            A beat.

            He smiled. 

“That’s okay.  I don’t expect you to answer.  Because look.  I know this is scary.  But gang, I’m not here to pull punches.  That ship has sailed.  We live in a scary world.  We live in a world made up of Good Guys and Bad Guys, and it’s getting damn near impossible to tell the difference.  Let me ask you something.”  He tapped the side of his mouth with an index finger, pretending to think. 

“So you’ve been in school for something like, what?  Eighty days?  And in those eighty days ….  Well.”  He stared at the students.  “So during those days since you first got off the bus, wearing your brand new sneakers and bright colorful outfits.  Since that first day of school.  When you got out of Mommy’s SUV with your bright water bottles and brand new backpacks.  Anyone want to hazard a guess as to how many mass shootings we’ve had since September?” 

Jenny Carlisle raised her hand.

“Little miss?” 

“What’s in those bags?”  She pointed.       

Trooper Longtree frowned.  “What?”  He shook his head.  “That’s not—”  He looked at Mrs. Waverly.  She didn’t look up from her computer.

 “Any other takers?”  He stared at the class.  After a moment he shrugged.  “That’s okay.  Tough question.  So check this.  One hundred and eighty.  Well, technically, one hundred and ninety-two, for those keeping track at home.  That’s right, ladies and gentlemen.  That’s a one.  A nine.  And a two.  One hundred and ninety-two mass shootings since September.  Now I’m sure I’m not as smart as your Mrs. Waverly, but even a dumb cop like me knows that that’s more than two mass shootings a day since the start of school.  Thanks for participating though.  Catch.” 

One of his sons tossed Sylvie a silver stress ball.  It bounced off her lap and rolled beside a bookshelf.  On one side of the ball the company’s contact information printed in a bold, blue font.  On the other, Longtree’s logo, a yellow triangle made from two pumped biceps.  Each clenched fist informed part of the makeshift ouroboros, and glittered within the room’s bright, fluorescent light. 

“Know what else?”  He shook his head.  Took a deep breath.  “You know, I debated even getting into this, but what the hell.  Facts, right?”  He looked at the ceiling, then centered his gaze on the children.  “So I’m driving here on my way to your beautiful school this morning, and my best friend from high school calls.  Know what he says?” 

Trooper Longtree waved off a fury of raised hands.   

“That’d be rhetorical, gang.  Anyways.”  Trooper Longtree clapped his hands.  “So what he tells me, my best buddy Marcus, what he says is that there’s been another school shooting, just a couple of hours ago.  And we’re not talking Texas.  We’re not talking Florida.  We’re not talking about some crazy far away place.  No.  We’re talking about a school just a few hours from here.  Just outside the city, as a point of fact.  Ten confirmed dead, plus your gunman, and at least a dozen more shot.  Critically injured.  Elementary school students.  Just like you.  Unfrickingbelievable.”  He took off his hat and ran a hand through his short, spiky hair. 

“Now, ladies and gentlemen”—he squared his hat atop his head—“you know what that is?”   

Most of the class didn’t. 

“That’s ten more mothers and ten more fathers learning, right now, while you’re sitting here warm and “secure” in your classroom, that they have to bury their children.  Ten.  At least.  And for what?”

The children looked at one another, their bright eyes wide and wet.  A few slowly raised their hands, shoulder high.         

“As much as I don’t enjoy telling you this, I have to tell you this.  Because you know what?” 

            No one did.  Well, other than Mallory, Trooper Longtree’s daughter.  

“You can stop worrying about if a Bad Guy is going to come into your classroom and start shooting you, your friends, and your teachers.  You can stop worrying about that right now.  Today.  And do you wish to know why?” 

            No one raised a hand. 

Trooper Longtree nodded.  “I’ll tell you why.  The reason why is because the time for worrying is gone.  The time to be concerned is over.  Hasta la vista, baby.  What I need you young men and women to start preparing for is when.  Because if I’m here to tell you anything, it’s this.  It will happen.  Sure.  It might not be Columbine.  It might not be Sandy Hook.  But it?”  He made a gun out of a hand and raised this to the ceiling.  “As God as my witness, it’s going to happen.”  He pointed a finger at the class.  “And you’ve got a long way to go before you get that cap and gown.  Before you cross that stage with your diploma.”     

“Here’s an easy one.”  Trooper Longtree freed his sidearm.  He held it before him.  “Does anyone want to tell me what this is?” 

            The little kids raised their hands.  Trooper Longtree pointed through the girls up front and called on a boy in the back.  “You, there.  In the red coat.”

            “Me?” Tommy Wilkerson said.

            “Do you see anyone else wearing a red coat?”

            “What?”

            “That would be affirmative, son.  Yes, you.” 

“A gun?”

            “That’s right, my man.  A gun.  Bun not just any gun.  This is a special gun.  This is my gun.  A Colt M1911.  Any idea how it got its name?”   

He looked at his sons and smiled.  Snapping his fingers, he pointed towards the students.  Catherine Asberdine said, “Because you thought it was a good name?” 

He turned to face the little girl.  “Because I thought it was a good name.” 

Trooper Longtree pursed and blew air through his lips, slowly nodded, and looked at his weapon while holstering the gun. 

“Manufacturers name their models, sweetness.  But ….”  He looked at the class.  “Well, you’re not too far off the mark.  Some Bad Guy comes after me?  Well, because I have chosen to protect myself, that son of a bitch will be the one calling 9-1-1.  That bastard will be the one with—”  He smiled and raised his hands, shoulder high.  “Hey.  Don’t blame me.  I’m just a cop.  I started Longtree Life Protection of my own volition because I am sick and tired.  I am sick and tired of Bad Guys running around like they have some sort of right to shoot up shopping centers.  To gun down public schools.     

“Do me a favor,” Trooper Longtree said.  Take a look around.  He made a circle with a finger, indicating the bright, colorful room.  “Raise your hand if you’ve ever hidden in one of these corners.”      

Most of the class raised their hands.  Mallory stared at her father.       

“Great.  High.  Higher!  Hold!”  He lifted his phone and shot their picture.  “Okay, now, each of you.”  He holstered his phone.  “I want every single one of you looking around the room.  Look at each of these supposedly ‘safe spaces.’  Great!  Okay.  Go ahead and lower them.  Go on, lower those hands.  Now, do me another favor.  Hang tight for just a few minutes.  Take off your hats and jackets.  You gotta be warmed up by now, right?  We’re just getting started, and I need a couple of minutes with this technology.  Not quite what we work with, over at barracks.  But it will do.  I mean, it’s got to, right?”         

Trooper Longtree turned to the Promethean Board.  He woke the giant screen, fingered some icons, then waved over his sons.  Stumped, he looked at the students.  Mallory made eye contact.  She stared until he looked away.  He called for Mrs. Waverly.   

“Gang,” Trooper Longtree said.  “While we’re waiting for this technology to catch up with us, I want you to think about those four corners.  The time for cowering is over.  The time for running is over.  Fuck you, Bad Guy!  Screw you, Mass Shooter!  I’m sorry, Mrs. Waverly, you’ll have to pardon my French.  But I didn’t come here to apologize.  I came here to save lives.”  He paced in front of the children as they returned from their cubbies and took their places on the carpet.  His black boots thudded.   

“Think you can come into my school, Mr. Bad Guy?  Think you can come into my classroom and shoot my teachers and shoot my friends.  You think you’re going to walk into my library and my cafeteria and shoot me?  Eff that!  Enough is enough.  Let me ask you a question.  Well.”  With two hands he reached towards his sons, and received fistfulls of stressballs.  “I guess it’s more of a fill in the blank.”   

“Fill in the blank, okay?  Are you all with me?  Good.  What comes next?  What word comes after Run ….  Hide ….” 

            “Fight!”  Most of the class cheered.    

“Damn straight!” 

Trooper Longtree tossed the balls in the air.  The balls fell where they landed, bouncing off and rolling between the students, coming to rest against beanbags and the legs of desks.  Unlike the rest of her classmates, Mallory didn’t move.   

“That’s damn right,” Trooper Longtree muttered. 

Mrs. Waverly returned to her seat. 

“Thank you,” he said.  And then, to Mallory, “Go ahead and get yourself one of those stress balls.”  He pointed towards the back of the room.  “You’re going to need it.”      

–

“It’s like they woke up and decided to get shot or something,” Trooper Longtree snorted.  He extended a hand, and one of his sons handed him a large gun.  Turning from the screen, he cradled the weapon like a newborn. 

“Jaby Besus.  It’s breathtaking.  Watching how these people act, it’s like they’re living in the 1920s.  Ladies and gentlemen, we have a saying where I work.  I can’t repeat it, here, but you have my contact information, there, on your stress balls.  Everyone have a stress ball now?” 

He looked at Mallory. 

“If not, see one of my friends here.  We’ll be using them, in a little bit, when we get into tactical maneuvers.  But yeah.  Send me an email, with your parent’s permission, of course, and I’ll be happy to share.  That goes for any other questions you might have.  We’re going to cover a lot of ground this afternoon.”  Trooper Longtree stared at the children, assessing engagement. 

He closed his eyes.  Took a deep breath. 

“Okay now, eyes up.  I promise that you’ll have time to play.  That’s right.  I said play.  You’ll have time with your balls later.”

A few of the boys giggled.  Some of the girls covered their mouths with their hands.   

He waited for the children to quiet.  He said, “Our program.  All of it.  The entire premise.  Everything that we do.  Longtree Life Protection is predicated upon fun.  Fun, and, of course, action.  And who here wouldn’t rather be doing something instead of,” he looked around the room, eyed the word wall, and said, “sitting around reading a poem.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  I love Dr. Seuss.  But it’s hard to read when you’re dead.   

“Gang.  What I’m trying to say is that right now I need all of you watching this.  Actively.  I need all of you paying very close attention.  I need all of you studying this clip as if your life depended on it.  You know why?”  He brought his weapon’s sight to an eye, turned, and peered at the screen.  “Because it does.” 

He mouthed the word Pow.   

Mallory looked to the side of the Promethean Board.  Earlier that morning, Mrs. Waverly had mounted their Rose Poems on red or black pieces of construction paper.  She had created a very special word wall.  One that resembled a giant checkerboard.  The other students had not seemed to notice.  Or care.  Mallory’s response was in the middle.  Mrs. Waverly had printed her words dark red, and used a much larger font.   

“Okay,” Trooper Longtree said.  “Let’s examine our first scenario.  And don’t worry.  We’re not going to show anyone getting killed.  Well, you know what I mean.  Not really.  But I am going to show you some real, actual, Bad Guys, and I am going to show you the bad things they’ve done.  More importantly, I will explain how.  Like, see?  Just look at how this Bad Guy, right here, in black ….”  He produced a laser from his pocket, and circled the man’s face.  The barrel of Trooper Longtree’s weapon went round and round.     

“I mean, just look!  He’s dressed like me.  Also, just like me, he’s holding one of these.”  Trooper Longtree extended his Colt M4 Carbine to one of his sons – the assistant who would later slip out of the classroom and return, wearing the company’s Redman Training XP Instructor Suit. 

“Now, let me be clear.  This is not your everyday law enforcement weapon, although I certainly keep a couple in my patrol car.  In the past, these were only issued to SWAT teams.  These guns were only given to those Good Guys who deal with some of the most dangerous Bad Guys us cops can face.  Because if a weapon, assault-style or otherwise, offers custom add-on capabilities, like scopes, and night vision devices and lasers, our bosses—”

The falling snow had transitioned to ice.  The ice clicked against the windows.  The class looked out the window.  The American flag whipped red and blue against the wind and the white.  A gust flattened against the glass, and a shelf of snow fell from the roof to the ground.    Those children who weren’t looking out the window were playing with their shoelaces.  A few had leaned back, and were staring at the ceiling.  Trooper Longree was losing them.  Time to get things moving. 

“Time.  Time, young men and women.  We just don’t have enough of it.  But I can tell you this.  Before?  Well, these particular weapons, like that serious gun I just gave my assistant, well, these were kept ‘on hand’ for worst case scenarios.”  He adjusted his hat.  Sighed.  

“Well, kids, I hate to break it to you, but this?  Your school?  Your classroom?  This, sad as it is to say, this is now a ‘worst case scenario.’  Bombs?  Fires?  Give me a freaking break.  I doubt even Mrs. Waverly can tell you the last time a student got killed by a bomb, or by some fire, at school.  It’s silly.” 

Trooper Longtree made a silly face.  Most of the little kids laughed. 

“Fun fact.  Forget the ice.  The snow.  Those windows right there?  Not bulletproof.  Don’t get me wrong.  Your administration, your superintendent?  That’s one good man, right there.  He’s done what he can.  That glass is pretty thick.  More importantly, it’s covered, like all your school’s windows, including those in the doors, with BulletShield, a DefenseLite derivative.”  He smiled.  “I know what you’re thinking.  Slow down Trooper Longtree!  Sorry.  But that’s just how passionate I am about protecting ….” his voice trailed off and he looked at the window as if it were a television. 

“Anyways, all that’s just a fancy way of saying your school has installed clear glass security over existing door and window glass.  If you really want to impress your grandparents this Christmas, tell them that your school acquired body armor for your windows.  Material that’s independently tested to meet UL 752 ratings for ballistic protection, and that—”   

Mallory silently read her poem, a finger tapping the beat.

The ground grabs her flowers,

It is not a game, they do not play.

Clouds come to scream at the sun,

She is hidden, she does not run. 

And the petals fall and start bleeding,

And it rains and the puddles turn pink.

And my desk is hard as a thorn

And, sitting here, I sink

And think, This floor is soft like mud. 

“Now ….”  Trooper Langree had started the video.  After a few moments he stepped to the board and tapped the man in black.  “Now, don’t watch him.  We don’t like him, and we’re not like him.  Does anyone here want to grow up to become a mass shooter?” 

Most of the kindergarteners shouted “No!” 

He paused the tape. 

“Okay.  Good.  Didn’t think so.  So.  Now.  While this is tough, and if we were at barracks I’d iso this for you, but you can wish in one hand ….

“Anyways.”  He shook his head, as if to clear a thought.  “Do your best to not look at the Bad Guy.  Instead, look at, concentrate on the woman sitting at the desk.  I’m going to play the video again.  Same speed.  From the beginning.  Remember.  This is in actual time.  Everyone ready?” 

Trooper Longree pressed play.  The kindergartener’s watched.  The shooter, wielding his weapon, walked into an office.  He seemed unsure what to do.  There was a sound to his left.  The entrance to a hallway.  The shooter turned and fired.  A great bright burst.  A man, shot in the shoulder, spun from view.  The woman sitting at the desk dropped beneath her desk.  The shooter walked towards the hallway.  The sound of a man screaming rained through the classroom’s surround sound, speakers built into the ceiling.  Another sound, indeterminate.  Unintelligible.  And then a burst of gunfire.  The shooter disappeared from view.  And then nothing.  A few moments later the secretary surfaced, grabbed her phone and purse, and ran in the direction from which the shooter had entered the space.  Trooper Longtree stopped the film.         

“Okay.  Now, which one of you bright young boys and girls can tell me what the woman at her desk did wrong?” 

            The secretary, Mallory silently mouthed, looking at her brothers, the sound of her father booming in her head.  Listening to him overcorrecting.  Always overcorrecting.  Telling the other kids how they were exactly wrong.  The secretary failed to …. 

And then she closed her eyes.  She worked to hear the wind, instead.   

*

The class went wild. 

They had not seen Trooper Longtree’s youngest son slip from the classroom, and so when he reentered, bright red and shiny in his Other Arms fighting suit, they pointed and laughed.  They covered their mouths and grabbed one another.  This, of course, was to be expected, and Trooper Longtree would give it a minute. 

The thing with kids these days wasn’t the kids ….  It was the parents.  Trooper Longtree had managed to exist for more than forty years on planet Earth before encountering the phrase “peanut allergy.”  The idea that reciting The Pledge of Allegiance was somehow a bad thing, that “Baby It’s Cold Outside” incited rape, and that men could – forget should – have babies? 

What in the actual fuck? 

What began as a melting pot had been reduced to a bloody alphabet soup.  Trooper Longtree was no bigot.  His creed was King’s, and judging a person by the content of their character was easy.  He understood why people were angry.  Maybe more than this, he understood why people were sad.  While it was no excuse, he also understood the harsh reality that people, sick people—evil people—sought their identities by shooting as many other people as possible.  But Longtree Life Protection wasn’t founded on those principles associated with victimhood.  And he wasn’t in the business of figuring out why.  At this point, he didn’t even care.  At least not really.  There was right, and there was wrong.  And Trooper Longtree didn’t need anything by way of “discourse” to discern the difference.   

“Okay, okay,” he said.  He raised his hands.  He smiled.  And then he frowned.  He said, “Alright, now.  Enough.  Ladies.  Gentlemen.  That’s enough.”     

Feet flush with the floor, hugging her legs, Mallory rested her chin on her knees.  She was tired.  What the woman on the video did wrong was “hide.”  What the man in the next video did wrong was “run.”  In the video after that, what the kids did wrong, a group of seventh-graders from a school across the country, kids not much older than herself who could hear their classmates screaming as, two doors down, a senior sprayed their bodies with bullets, was climb through a safety window. 

Who’s to say there isn’t another shooter outside, waiting to pick them off, one by one, like so many ducks in a barrel? 

There were other scenarios.  More questions from her father.  Mallory listened to her classmates offer all sorts of wrong answers, because she knew, from her dad, that you were supposed to fight.  That her dad, with help from her brothers, was here to teach the class there was no other way.  There was no other answer.  It—dead kids—was now a numbers game.  Most killers were cowards.  Not to mention dumb.  The way to minimize casualties was to disrupt the shooter.  While he only said this at home, or in the car on the way home from church, the hard truth was that someone, many times someones, had to take it for the team. 

When the class wouldn’t quiet, Trooper Longtree nodded to his son.  His son handed him a Chromebook.  Trooper Longtree stepped to his other son, Mark, the one in the red suit, and swung the computer, violently striking him in the head.  The face. 

This had the desired effect. 

Jamey started crying.  Alex curled into a ball.  A child raised her hand.  And then another.  Trooper Longtree returned the Chromebook.  He positioned himself in front of the class. 

“Thank you,” Trooper Longtree said.  “Now, class.  Don’t you worry about Mr. Mark over there.  He is just fine, so you can lower your hands.  I’m just glad that I now seem to have commanded your attention.  Because we’re moving past theory to enter practice.”   

Trooper Longtree explained that Other Arms Fight Suits are used for self-defense simulation, taser, and baton training exercises.  He emphasized just how widely the equipment is used in law enforcement, martial arts, and military training.  Hands on hips he added, “And, most importantly, offensive tactics.” 

Most of the kindergarteners had regained their composure.  Only a few students wiped away tears, or looked out the window, following the mixed precipitation as it transitioned, primarily, to snow.  Trooper Longtree’s phone pinged.  He checked his device.  He read the text.  Superintendent Jenne would soon make an announcement that, due to deteriorating weather conditions, students would be dismissed early. 

“Well, that changes things,” Trooper Longtree said to himself.  “Looks like we may have to come back.  But we’re okay, for now.” 

He looked at the class.  He decided what best to do. 

The Promethean Board, due to inactivity, blinked off and into darkness.  

“Now, I know you’re all excited about this weather.  So I’ll let you in on a secret.”  He managed a smile.  “A little birdie told me there won’t be school tomorrow.  That you’ve got yourselves a little unexpected three-day vacation.” 

Mrs. Waverly sighed, and began straightening her desk.  He waited for the children to stop cheering. 

“So what I need from you is your undivided attention.  Can you give me that?” 

Most of the kindergarteners said they could. 

“Now, Mr. Mark here is completely safe.  He’s wearing the top of the line training suit, one whose versatility is completely unmatched.  Preparing for the worst demands that we work with the best.  The best equipment.  The best materials.  The best people.  Mrs. Waverly wouldn’t give you paper and then a pencil with no lead, right?  Or ….”  He seemed to struggle to come up with another analogy, smiled, and shrugged.   

“Anyways, you don’t have to worry about him.  He has all the important padding he could possibly need, and then some.  Plus, as you can see ….”

Mark pantomimed a series of maneuvers.  One moment a samurai.  The next, a creepy school shooter.  And then, after his father nodded, he imitated a popular cartoon character.  Most of the class laughed. 

“Yep.  He’s got all of this without sacrificing any necessary flexibility.”

Mallory knew what came next. 

The Fun Part. 

First, her dad was going to show the class how, if necessary, their Chromebooks could be turned into weapons.  Given their size, by which he meant Mallory and the other children, these weren’t ideal.  But, he would point out, for every problem, there was a solution.  Or solutions. 

Next, he called for a volunteer.  Trooper Longtree looked at the raised hands, and, while sifting through faces for the perfect subject, he made a big show of the process, covering for Mark who reached behind one of the canvas bags, grabbed and concealed what he needed, then stepped from the room, unnoticed.     

The class watched Cassidy Newhouse walk to the front of the room.  The children clapped and cheered as Trooper Longtree, doing a bit of a jig, hooted, hollered, and pumped his fist.  Mallory felt bad.  Cassidy thought that she would, but she was not going to like The Fun Part.  Dad always picked the softest, gentlest kid, first.  You can tell by their eyes, Mallory had heard him explain to her brothers.  Over dinner.  On rides to the dojo.  You wouldn’t necessarily think it, but how well they’ll perform?  This has very little to do with their stature.  Their size.    

“This,” he explained, “is because only the strongest, bravest kids in class will dare to volunteer next, and we need maximum energy to convince the others to take part in what, more than anything, is a numbers game, if not quite a suicide mission.”     

Closing her eyes, Mallory listened as her father asked Cassidy a series of questions.  Did she have any siblings?  Pets?  Four dogs?  Really?  No way!  What are their names?  These questions, Mallory knew, were designed more to distract the class than anything.  To make them forget about Mark.  That he—

“Bang!” Mark screamed. 

Calmly, he stepped into the classroom (Mallory thought he looked like a big red ant), and, training his modified Nerf gun on Cassidy’s arms and thighs, sprayed her with soft, pink bullets.  The bullets, Mallory’s father always maintained, did not hurt.  He would, following the “cell phone” demonstration, allow the class to shoot him.  Freely.  But that was only if his volunteer was still crying.  But her dad wasn’t so smart.  He had forgotten what, when you were little, really hurt. 

Stunned, the little girl fell to the ground.  She curled into a ball.  Mark approached, pulled a Nerf pistol from a holster hidden behind him, popped her once in the head, then, stepping over her, slowly turned to face the class. 

No one moved. 

Elementary students, unlike other age groups, while certainly annoying in their own ways, didn’t, as a rule, go for a laugh.  They looked up to their teachers.  They respected authority.  They were a year away—or, if lucky, two—from possessing anything by way of pure (what Trooper Longtree considered calculated) cruelty.  They, in a word, loved. 

Once you got past sixth grade, though, children were almost worthless.  You had to wait until high school, really, before you could look at a kid and expect anything by way of reason and accountability.  Trooper Longtree watched Mark with pride.  Admiration.  He wondered what he’d do next. 

The room was silent.  The class did not move.  The ice had completely transitioned to snow and fell so heavily that the light inside the classroom seemed brighter.  Mark walked around the children in a wide arc.  In each hand a weapon, both pointed towards the ground.  Opportunity presented itself as everything.  Mrs. Waverly stood from her chair.  Face flushed, she was angry.  She opened her mouth to speak, and Mark holstered his handgun, pointed the larger toy in her direction, and blasted the woman with bullets, screaming “Bang!” repeatedly until, defeated, unable to speak over Mark Longtree, Mrs. Waverly, pink bullets popping from her shoulders and legs, took her seat, holding her head in her hands. 

Most of the kids were crying.  Several had closed their eyes.  A vestigial response that could be traced to near infancy.  What they didn’t see couldn’t be happening, and so they were safe from harm.  This mentality was not unusual.  This—Trooper Longtree eyed the clock and decided he would give Mark a few more minutes—was the problem. 

Yesterday, Longtree Life Protection conducted the same training with a bunch of telemarketers.  While the men and women obviously weren’t crying, they might as well have been.  If a person wasn’t told exactly what to do, and when, that person did nothing.  Which is why Trooper Longtree’s message was simple:  Fight.  No running.  No hiding.  No thinking.  Just fighting.  That was all.  He hoped Superintendent Jenne had them back.  There was so much left to cover.       

Mallory watched her brother.  She knew he was waiting for someone to do something.  Anything.  She had heard her father tell stories of how some kids, in other schools, ran.  How others, knowing it was a training, threw pens or pencils at her brother – a means to distract him.  (This behavior, which her father called Active Distraction, was encouraged, and taught during a different part of the presentation.)  Later, Mallory knew, her father would show the students how to hold their pens or pencils like tomahawks, and how to aim for their attackers’ temple – or, as the case may be, his groin.  Her father would preach that in the event of an active shooter situation they should, instead of running for cover, attack the door, forming a line just off to the side, wielding whatever they were able to find by way of weapon.  He would teach them how, if the man entered the room, at least four of them should attack him, going first for his weapon.   

“Knowing what we know now,” and he would list what he now knew, “running is, at least if you want to live, a last resort.” 

And then he would run through the statistics. 

“These are cowards we’re dealing with,” he’d point out.  “They don’t need much of an opportunity to bow out, to find someone unwilling to fight.” 

But all that was later.   

Mark dropped to a knee.  He fired a few bullets at his father, who fell to the floor.  His brother charged him, and Mark calmly turned and used his remaining bullets to dispose of the only other adult in the room.  He dropped the weapon onto a bean bag.  Somewhere outside the room and down the hall the sound of children laughing.  He turned and made for the door, freeing his Nerf handgun. 

Only Mark stopped.  Turned.  Faced the class.  As if rooted in place by a new thought, he slowly ….

*

It’s just me, now.  It’s Mallory. 

            Listen.  You can trust me – I’m no longer in class.  

            I’m at home. 

In fact, I am a senior in high school.  I’m still alive.   

I bet many of you can imagine how my dad’s presentation ends.  But don’t.  Imagine.  Look through the glass and watch the snow fall and swirl and turn your head and hear the wind push and pull those flakes bright as stars and sharp as sand.  See how it’s all so real it feels fake. 

Watch that instead. 

Listen to that instead. 

You might think so, but you really don’t want to watch my brother, Mark, dressed shiny and red like an ant, some stooge who has raised his gun as he makes for our reading rug and then stomps through us little boys and girls in his red suit and how he does not stop just yet because there is still a child—me—who wrote of the mud and not of the rose because wouldn’t you, if you were me, always be thinking about other things? 

He will keep moving because I am still sitting.  

Because listen. 

Any moment now he will raise his gun and shoot me in the head and later, at home, I will get in big trouble if I don’t play dead, and so I’ll roll over and I won’t move.  I will play dead.   

And yes.  The school can train us. 

And yes.  My dad can train us. 

And my dad can say that when this is done and over and they leave ….  My dad can say that if what we heard and what we learned today goes on to save one life, all of this will be worth it. 

And yeah, maybe, possibly ….  I guess what he says might be true. 

But, statistically – to use one of my dad’s favorite words – the only thing I know for sure is that he is the only one who is happy. 

And when my dad is happy? 

            I’d much rather be sad.