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Author: Christian Fisher

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. 

SUNFLOWERS

Written by Christian Fisher. Posted in Fiction.

‘The sunflowers looked at him rather than at the sun.’  Milorad Pavić

My father was a handsome and charming man. I say this as a matter of fact, not out of pride, or to claim any reflected glory, because my father cared very little about me. Throughout my childhood he rarely spoke to me, or to my sister Anna. But although he paid no attention to me, as a small boy I was always intensely aware of my father, who walked like a giant through my early life. And that awareness was greater because, as a consulting engineer, my father regularly worked at home, in one of the front rooms, which he had converted into his study.

This study was the warmest room in the house. It had three windows, including a wide bay window looking out to the street. Bookshelves covered two of its walls from floor to ceiling. There was a heavy walnut desk set across one corner, an inclined draughting table at which my father stood to work, and a dark green leather couch. I think, but I cannot say for certain, from time to time my father slept on that couch rather than go to the bedroom where my mother slept. There are many things in my childhood I now, with hindsight, think may have occurred, but which at the time I did not understand, did not know how to interpret, or perhaps simply refused to register.

The door of the study was always closed, whether my father was there or not, and my sister and I could not enter without permission. That rule came not from him, but from my mother, who spoke of the study as if it began with a capital letter. The air in there, too, was different to the air in the rest of the house; dry, faintly dusty, smelling of leather, sun-warmed even in winter. But within that sacrosanct room was something even more sacred, the walnut desk and, even more yet, its drawers. The desk was broad, with three or four drawers, bearing elaborately curled brass handles, arranged on either side of the chair.

I retain the knowledge, even the physical sensation, that these desk drawers were utterly forbidden from one particular event. I was six or seven years old. I had gone into the study, with permission from my mother, instructed to retrieve something, perhaps a coffee pot. My father was not there, and I had the idea he was out of the house. I took advantage of this rare opportunity to approach the desk – a stripe of sunlight was falling diagonally across the burgundy leather inlay on its top – and look inside its drawers. I stealthily slid out each drawer in turn, slowly, so my mother would not hear anything. I was too aware of the enormity of what I was doing to open them more than half-way.

I recall the smell of the drawers rather than their contents; a mixed smell of wood and pencil-shavings and ink. I am sure there were rulers and dividers and pens and rubber stamps and letterhead paper and so on; I cannot say I remember. But what I do remember is that, in one of the bottom drawers, in an unlocked metal box, I found a revolver. Startlingly black and shiny, it lay on a piece of green cloth. I took it out and looked at it carefully. I knew what it was; I had toy wooden guns, and one of my uncles had a cigar lighter made in the shape of a pistol. This then was the real version, the archetype, of a toy, and therefore a very wonderful toy indeed. I also understood it was a secret object, hidden, something I would never see on one of Father’s crammed bookshelves or lying on the desktop.

I remember the touch of the revolver even today, the hardness and surprising coldness of it, and its smell of oiled metal. It was fully loaded. I know that because I also remember the shiny brass firing caps of the bullets in their revolving chamber. It was heavy, far, far heavier than my wooden toy pistols. I had to use both hands to hold it steady out in front of me, pointing it at various things in the room; the lampshade, the telephone, the clock on the wall.

I was so caught up in amazement at this magical object that I forgot I was meant to get in and out of the study quickly. I was still standing in the middle of the room, holding the gun, when my father entered. I saw him come through the doorway, his shape filling most of it. I froze. I expected, no, I knew, I would be in terrible, unimaginable trouble for being in the study and touching his things. Especially this secret powerful thing. But my father smiled, and walked toward me with his hands held wide apart. He spoke to me – I suppose he said my name, though I can’t recall that – then reached out and very gently took the revolver out of my hand.

He put it down somewhere, then he took my arm, also gently, and we walked out of the study together. He closed the door; it seemed even more than usual a definitive shutting-off of that room from the rest of the house. I was astonished that he displayed no anger at all.

 Once we were out in the living room he knelt on the carpet in front of me and put his hands on my shoulders. He looked me full in the face. I was startled, because he focussed his entire attention onto me, which he had never done before. I remember the feeling of that attention, I remember noticing his eyes were blue, which I can’t recall knowing at any other time, and I remember thinking whatever was to come, at least my father was fully aware of me. And then he spoke.

‘Martin, if you ever touch the drawers of my desk again, I will give you a thrashing you will never forget for your whole life. Do you understand me?’ His voice was not loud; indeed he spoke quietly, but it was compressed and forceful. Every word hit me like a blow. No, not a blow, that gives the wrong impression, because the effect was not brutal; every word was like an electric shock. Reinforced by the blaze of his blue eyes close to mine, eyes which suddenly seemed very large, huge, his words went straight into the centre of my being. I have heard them over again a thousand times since.

‘Yes, father,’ I answered. He nodded, stood up and walked away. I remember seeing his back as he went out of the living room, toward the kitchen. Standing, he was once again very big, very much taller than me. I heard him speaking to my mother, but I didn’t make out what was said. No doubt he was telling her what had happened – but no, as I write this I wonder whether my mother actually knew of the existence of the revolver. Perhaps he was just telling her he had found me in his study. Or perhaps something quite unrelated to me at all.

I ran to my room and sat on my bed, trembling. I resolved that I would never touch his desk again. I intended absolutely to obey my father, but more, I wanted him to see that I obeyed him, that I was capable of discipline. ‘In a year from now,’ I thought, ‘he will see I have not touched his desk for a year, and he will be proud of me.’ Proud of me? No, I didn’t think that, to be honest. ‘He will acknowledge I have obeyed his instructions,’ is what I actually thought, because that was how I thought of my relationship with my father.

It’s funny; I always called him ‘Father,’ which even in those days was a very old-fashioned form of address. My mother at one time encouraged Anna and me to call him ‘Dad’ – we called her ‘Mum’ – but the first time I said it to him, he lowered the newspaper he was reading, looked at me, then raised the paper again without answering. The next time I addressed him, I called him ‘Father’ again, and he responded.

I realise my account of these incidents makes him sound hard, or callous. He was not. He threatened me, that once, with a thrashing, but he never actually punished me throughout my entire childhood, never even raised his voice to me. He fundamentally had no interest in me. I couldn’t understand that then; I thought parents had to be interested in their children, because they had created them. My sister and I were aware of our mother’s attention to us in a thousand ways. But having no interest in us, and no instinctive sense of how to deal with us, our father adopted – heaven knows where he acquired it, probably from his own father, now I think of it – a completely formulaic way of relating to his children, and left it at that. I dimly understood he was not very interested in my mother, either, although even that understanding is perhaps overlaid with my perception as an adult, and in the light of what happened later.

I wanted my father to like me, of course, partly because he was my father, but also because he was the largest thing in my world; a big man, certainly, but when to his size you added his deep voice, his cigars and hair-oil and heavy square-shouldered overcoat and highly-polished shoes, his Horch touring car, his rolled-up blueprints and his leather document-case, to me he had the size and gravity of a mountain.

And it was not merely physical size; he embodied authority, in the home but also in the world. I observed – I watched surreptitiously when clients came to our house – that men, well-dressed men, some in uniform, who arrived in shiny black cars with drivers who opened the door for them, treated him with deference. Mother frequently told us Father was a very important man, usually in the course of telling us he was not to be disturbed at a given moment. And he spoke about powerful people dismissively – not the empty, boastful criticism of the weak, but as from a position of strength. ‘Woyzeck is a fool, and I didn’t hesitate to tell him so,’ I heard him say to my mother once on returning home from a meeting of some kind. Woyzeck was Doctor Julius Woyzeck, whom I knew from school lessons to be our Governor. I didn’t doubt for a moment that Father had said exactly that to him.

My father was certainly attractive. I mean that literally; people were attracted to him, as if he were a magnet. In any group, he always seemed to be in the middle, with everyone else’s eyes on him, and it was the same in every photograph of him I saw. I took it to be natural, as his right.

He once told us he had acted in plays at university, and that sometimes he wished he had become an actor. I remember him saying this, sitting at the head of the table just before dinner one evening, with a silver soup tureen in front of him, and a white napkin tucked into his collar. I remember because it seemed a remarkable confession from my father; it amounted to saying he’d made a mistake, or had a regret, neither of which were things I could associate with him. I always believed him to be master of his whole life. But perhaps his youthful theatrical training had proved useful, teaching him to command the stage, to time the delivery of his words for maximum effect.

I did see some evidence of my father’s theatrical abilities. My mother regularly held musical recitals in our home, to which friends and neighbours were invited. They were conducted in the parlour, a big room with yellow striped wallpaper. It contained an upright piano and a number of chairs, covered in red plush, which were used only for these salons. My mother would play piano, Schubert and Mozart, and a neighbour, a small man with glasses whose name I have forgotten, played violin, I believe very capably. My father did not always attend, but when he did, he sang Lieder, with my mother as accompanist, or read from Goethe, usually Faust. Listening to someone read doesn’t sound very exciting, but – I think this is an accurate memory – people always attended to him expectantly and in silence. He read accurately and resonantly, without exaggeration or affectation.

From the age of about eight I was allowed to attend these soirees, sitting behind all the guests on a single straight-backed chair near the door; Anna, three years younger, was not, a source of pain to her even in her adult life. ‘You’re so lucky,’ she said to me several times, on one occasion close to tears. ‘You can remember more of him than I. I never got to see him sing, or read, or anything. I wish I had.’ I did not disturb her assumption that I welcomed these memories.

These evenings were my mother’s only public appearance, and perhaps her greatest pleasure. She set out an elaborate table, with a variety of food and drink. Tokay wine I remember particularly, because I was fascinated by the improbable Hungarian words on the label, but there were no doubt other drinks, as I recall light reflecting from crystal decanters, and there were certainly little pies and pastries, rolls, cheese and smoked meat, cakes of different kinds, jellied fruits and bowls of wrapped sweets. After the music, there was coffee and animated conversation, often until late. And I noticed, in that more relaxed atmosphere, that women paid attention to my father, and he responded to them. In those days, women dressed colourfully, or at least that is my memory; standing round my father like flowers planted around a monument, they turned their faces to him as sunflowers to the sun.

On these evenings I saw a side of my father I saw at no other time; smiling, his dark eyebrows mobile, his white teeth flashing. There were jests and repartee. I even saw him clap a man on the shoulder, laughing, although I don’t remember ever seeing anyone touch him so familiarly. But my predominant memory of those evenings is of women finding my father entertaining, attractive, I’d say now. If it was obvious to me, it must have been even more obvious to my mother, but I didn’t think of that at the time.

And I remember that after these salons, when all the guests had gone, I would secretly – why I thought it had to be secretly I don’t exactly know – slip back into the parlour, where I could smell women’s perfume, several different perfumes, it seemed, mingled with wine and stale cigarette smoke. I associated this sweet, almost sickly, scent, hanging in the warm, tired air of the room, with something forbidden. Again, I may be overlaying that memory now with hindsight. But the contrast between my father’s behaviour on those evenings and his conduct in the home all the rest of the time was very marked.

Our father’s indifference to his children affected my sister more than me. I was at boarding school from the age of twelve, went to Vienna immediately on passing my baccalaureate, and for ten years after that had no contact with my father. I had to find other role models. But Anna stayed at home, attending a local day-school, and all through her adolescence had to bear his disregard. From what little she has told me, that disregard, to her and our mother, if possible increased over the last three or four years before he finally left the family. And of course as a daughter, Anna naturally craved her father’s attention and affection, and was the more distressed when she didn’t receive it.

Indeed, I don’t doubt our father’s inattention to her affected Anna’s life profoundly. After finishing school, she remained living with my mother into her late twenties, until she went to Leonding to be married to a man I didn’t know, and as I understand it she scarcely knew either. Three years later, the marriage having failed, she returned home to Linz and lived with my mother again until she bought a small apartment in the Franckviertel district. There she retreated into deeper and deeper layers of secrecy and incommunicability.

But this is not a story about Anna, or about me. It is about my father.

As I say, he left the family. I was seventeen then. It was during the school term, so I was not at home when he departed. I received a letter from my mother, telling me in two dry, matter-of-fact pages that my father had met someone else, that she had agreed not to contest a divorce, that we would be moving out of our villa into a smaller house Father had bought, and that he had already left for Graz, to live with the woman who was to be his next wife. At the end of term I went home, or rather to my mother’s new house, small but pleasant, with a well-tended garden, and found my books and childhood toys packed up in boxes. I left them there when I went back to school; I never retrieved them.

The way I have described my father’s leaving sounds absurdly simple and unemotional, but that is how it appeared to me at the time. Now, of course, I know it was far from simple and unemotional for my mother, who, quite apart from any interior pain, felt publicly shamed. Nor was it so for my sister. But at the time I simply accepted the constellations had rearranged. I didn’t attempt to contact my father in Graz – after all, he hadn’t even told me he was leaving – and he didn’t contact me. I finished school, enrolled in university, and went on to try and shape my own life, relying on my own resources. Of course I made mistakes, but I also learned, quickly enough, what life required of me.

And I rather looked down on my university colleagues who spoke about their parents, or quoted their father’s opinions; I considered them undeveloped, immature. Surely at twenty, I thought, you had to put your parents behind you. Perhaps for that reason I formed few friendships there. I applied myself to my studies and graduated with a good degree in law. I inherited none of my father’s musical ability, but I did achieve a reasonable proficiency at chess. With those qualifications I set out to establish myself in the world.

 It was a decade later than this that I saw my father again. He must have been nearly sixty. This was just after the Anschluss, about two years before the war. I had established my law practice in Vienna, had a position in well-established chambers, and was, if I may say so, regarded as up-and-coming.

Returning from court one afternoon I was given a note, in copperplate handwriting I recognised as my father’s. He wrote that he was staying at the Hotel Kaiserin Elisabeth, and asked if it would be convenient for him to visit me the next day. Even then, already an adult professional, the idea of my father asking if something suited me struck me as strange. I sent a telegram suggesting eleven o’clock.

I had a good deal of work to do that evening, but I was continually distracted by the prospect of my father’s impending visit. Of course, I could imagine him only as I’d last seen him, and I visualised a man a head and a half taller than me striding through my door the next morning. Why he wanted to see me, and what I would say to him, were equally unguessable. That night I even dreamed of his visit; he was wearing a chalk-striped Italian overcoat which I remembered from my boyhood. In my sleep I could smell his hair oil.

The next morning, I reassured myself that my anxiety was baseless; my father was just another man, whatever position he might hold. I was used to dealing with people in authority, and indeed was now a man with some degree of authority myself.

I know that in the conventional father-son story, I would have found my father, on meeting him again after fifteen years, smaller, less impressive. He would have had some reversal of fortune, and would perhaps ask me for a favour, for legal advice, possibly even a loan. Or again, he might look at me pensively and say, ‘I haven’t been much of a father to you, have I?’ And I would forgive him, we might even embrace, and then we would each go on our way having dealt with the father-son problem to finality. That is what occurs in the conventional narrative. But it wasn’t like that at all.

At precisely eleven, he was announced. He came through the door of my chambers, still wearing his hat and overcoat, making both the doorway and my whole room seem small. When I stood to greet him I saw we were now the same height, but the impression of his size did not abate. From his outward appearance, he was an even more important man than before. His suit was immaculately tailored, his tiepin diamond, and he wore a small gold Hakenkreuz badge in his lapel.

He looked around my rooms, the walls full of books, the heavy desk, the Persian carpet, the leather client chairs, and nodded. He tossed his overcoat and hat onto one chair, and sat heavily in the other, across the desk from me. Not knowing what else to say, I began to tell him about my practice, and he nodded from time to time, but nevertheless seemed to be only half listening.

It struck me forcefully that I felt nothing on seeing my father. Absolutely nothing, neither fear nor affection, nor nostalgia for my childhood, nor even curiosity about his life and occupation. I was no more engaged in talking to him than I would have been speaking to a reporter, or some uncle of a colleague. After all my concerns of the night before, now that he was here, my father’s visit seemed no more than a formality to be dealt with. I even began to calculate how soon I could get back to my work. I realised I still didn’t know why he had come, but I decided whatever it was, it could have nothing really to do with me.

‘Yes, I see you have done well for yourself, Martin,’ he said when I came to a pause, and while at one time in my life those words would have meant the world to me, I took nothing from them now. In fact, I bridled at the idea that my reason for being a lawyer was to do well for myself.

‘If I’ve done well, Father, as you’re pleased to say, it’s because I work hard, and because I try to give a voice to those who need it, who have no voice of their own,’ I said. Finally allowing myself to feel annoyed with him, and caught up in my own rhetoric, I went on:

‘You wouldn’t know this about me, but I actually believe in fairness, in justice. And I do my best to see it’s brought about.’

My father smiled, and shook his head slightly. He leaned forward in his chair and looked at me directly; I couldn’t remember him looking straight into my eyes since that day, more than twenty years before, when he’d found me in his study.

‘Martin,’ he said, then, pausing between each word, ‘life is not like that.’ Still smiling, he leant back again, gesturing dismissively with one hand.

‘Life does not balance its books. There is no higher ledger recording right and wrong. I know you are a lawyer and I am not, but let me tell you, there is no justice in this world. Your scrabbling around trying to see what you call justice done is about as important to the real world as a tadpole swimming in a puddle. I understand how you think, Martin, because most people think like you. Be honest, before I arrived you were entertaining some thoughts of forgiving me, weren’t you? The truth is you could not forgive me even if you really desired to. You don’t have what forgiveness requires. Only the strong can forgive, and that strength comes from the exercise of power, not from good intentions, or a diploma.’

Before I could compose a retort, he stood, raked his fingers through his hair, still glossy and black, put on his hat, and picked up his overcoat.

‘Don’t misunderstand me. I’m glad you’ve had success. You have ability, I’m sure you do work hard, and hard work and ability will usually find their reward. D’you smoke cigars? No? A pity; I brought you a box of real Fonsecas. Never mind, I’ll put them to good use,’ he said, patting his breast pocket. Smiling again, he held out his hand. I shook it, for the first and last time in my adult life, a strong, warm grip. Then he left.

After he had gone, I realised I had no idea why he had come. He had asked me nothing, and told me nothing about himself. I could only assume he’d wanted to see whether I had so far succeeded in life, but why? Out of some belated sense of paternal pride, or to assuage his conscience for abandoning me, abandoning his family? Or for some other reason entirely; perhaps to see if I could be useful to the new Europe?

Whatever its purpose, my father’s visit profoundly disconcerted me. Once I had subdued my anger at his contemptuous dismissal of my beliefs, his assertion that justice was unimportant troubled me in another way; it left me fearful for the future, as my father was obviously very close to those who shaped the events of the world. If this emerging world was to be one without justice, without compassion, I trembled for it. Only the next day, back in court, did I recover some of my self-assurance, but even then, his words still resonated disturbingly.

The war came, of course, and interrupted everyone’s lives. I served, was injured – not heroically but in an artillery training accident – and returned to civilian life. The years immediately after the war in Austria are not worth speaking about, except that my mother died, knocked down by a Russian jeep when crossing the road in front of her house. I found it harder and harder to resist my father’s assertion that there is in this life no justice. Nevertheless, the structure of things slowly returned toward something like normality.

I had no news of my father during the six years of the war. I assumed he was involved in some way, probably in some engineering project that didn’t bring his name into the news. It may seem odd that I didn’t try to find out, then or later, but the fact was I had spoken to him only once in the last twenty years, and the war and its aftermath gave me a great deal more to be concerned with than inquiring after a man I hardly knew, even if he were my father.

I do know that he survived the war, because once, just once, I heard from him again. I had settled back into my law practice, and the courts were operating as before, so it must have been ten years after our last meeting. I had married and had a son and daughter of my own by that time, and to be honest I thought as little about my childhood and family as possible.

But I definitely remember this final communication from him. Although I can’t be certain of the year, the day remains in my memory, because it was one of those glaring, brassy late August days when everybody in Vienna is thoroughly sick of the summer heat and wishes to heaven autumn would arrive. Even in my rooms, with an electric fan going, my shirt collar was sticking uncomfortably to my neck.

An envelope arrived for me bearing my father’s immediately recognisable handwriting. It had no return address, but bore an American stamp and a Chicago postmark. Inside was a card, with an inscription wishing me a happy birthday, signed ‘Your Father.’

My birthday is, in fact, in November. I dropped the envelope and card into the waste paper basket at my feet. At home that evening, I saw no reason to mention the matter to my wife.

I have not heard from my father, or about him, again. Whether his being in America proves there is justice in the world or not, I cannot say. As I am now sixty, he must almost certainly have passed on, but I have no idea where or when or how. I prefer not to think of my father at all. I have only set down this account to put it behind me, in the hope I do not have to think about him again. But he was, I have to say, the most handsome and charming man I ever knew.

Not Even a Wrist of Flesh and Bone

Written by Christian Fisher. Posted in Poetry. 

The girl got him a bracelet
for his right arm, already holding 
twelve bangles of silver and of gold.  

He never wore it, said, instead,
each circle had to come to him 
by chance:

the Middle Eastern deli counter man
who’d given him the middle one,
the New York psychic—grabbed his arm

and told him to beware.
They couldn’t just be gifts, what with
their implications of enclosure, continuation.

And so, the brass loop was stashed in his backpack,
the same one he would drop first on her floor.
 She never saw what else might be inside

but wondered if, like the circle, 
known by many as a magical space,
it held nothing in its center 
but air.

Knowing, Not Not-Knowing

Written by Christian Fisher. Posted in Nonfiction.

There are no instructions for the slow, seismic shift of growing up between languages, only the gradual ache of realizing you are a creature of halves, a face that answers to two names while the mirror offers back a sentence forever cut short.

You moult and shift, a flicker passing through the cracks of translation, yet people rarely see the leaving; they mistake your silence for forgetting and your flutter for indecision, never realizing you are already inhabitng the “in-between.”

Most chances arrive in two tongues, usually a beat too late to choose, leaving you to rehearse a private freedom in Spanglish—an elective exile that feels simultaneously like an escape and a return. You begin to gather the symptoms of this displacement like uncollated notes: memory becomes a border crossing and belonging feels like a passport that was never stamped, and looking back, you realize that your stillness was merely survival, though it doesn’t quiet the panic that rises when both flags finally hang still in the wind.

The answer, if it exists, refuses to speak; instead, it burns with a quiet, hungry heat that flickers beneath thick accents and those phrases that refuse to be carried across the line.

It is a soft light surviving its own contradictions, the rhythm of something alive in two directions at once; a constant, rhythmic ping-pong of sí and yes, of ni modo and maybe, the echo of a word chasing its own shadow. To speak is to never quite know which tongue holds the absolute truth, to write dusk and then crepúsculo and realize they describe two entirely different heavens.


Some days are measured only by the wait between customs lines, like a farmer gauging the soil between his strawberries and the distant fence, realizing that the moon above him is already bilingual and that there is a profound, silent peace in finally refusing to choose; in letting the land translate itself.


They climb the ridge together, careful not to disturb the desert hush, understanding now that curiosity is a path with two names and that the valleys behind them are destined to blur.

At the summit, they find no finality, only a mesquite tree spreading wide, its leaves speaking the shared vernacular of sky and soil.

The children followed those leaves once, each step a word in a language they hadn’t yet mastered, every path a return to a place they had never actually left, their history threading their tongues like a long, shared breath. This was the secret they stumbled upon: that awe, when properly placed, makes the body invisible to sorrow.

I watch them now through the slant of memory, letting their eyes become mine until I hear the mountains speaking in a multi-hearted code, a miracle repeated so often it begins to sound like a lullaby. Nature is borderless, yes, but it is also painstakingly specific, and we find we can belong in more than one place at once. There are other names for this—dichos, refranes, prayers whispered into the wind; but sometimes it is enough simply to walk and listen to the oldest trees murmuring between breaths.


The rain knows where to fall, favoring the late afternoons and perfuming the mesquite before the sky clears, and when the sun rises sharp and blue, you see how tender the city has become. It is not broken, merely translated, as if the sky left its mouthprint across the rooftops and the mind, astonished, keeps layering more, realizing that knowing in two languages makes the imagination thicker, wilder, and infinitely more resilient.

Which leaves us with the only question that remains: Is it a kind of blessing, this constant knowing without ever needing to know that we know?

fireflies

Written by Christian Fisher. Posted in Poetry. 

friday night
we slid into creation
as if nothing could touch us

catching fireflies,
we smashed palms
leaving luminescent
smears
on sweaty brows

diving into tide pools,
salt stinging our knees,
we were still laughing

when the water shifted

and there they were—
history’s ghosts:

crushed skulls
lining the banks

Of the Art of Bookbinding

Written by Christian Fisher. Posted in Student Section.

First Place Winner of the Novus Literary Arts Journal High School Creative Writing Contest

I know foggily of the way my grandfather used to sit in his chair and look at me. He was ninety-one, and I was eight. Combined, our ages could have nearly turned a century– I never knew him well. I know his stories and his sayings. Sayings so clever that, anytime in doubt, my father would attach his name to a clever, anonymous aphorism.

“That’s what Homer used to say.”

Or,

“Dad used to say that.”

I heard, through many, of his vivacity in business. Of how he made his fortune in Nashville from a deal written on the back of a napkin. He was a bookbinder and he, “could make paper do anything he wanted.”

He was stationed in an electric wheelchair for the latter end of his life. In his own bed, he died peacefully. I’ve heard his stories and, as a Southern gentleman, of his involvement in flame-lit circles. And of his severance from those circles.

My only memories of him are, most potently, checkers. I hate the game checkers, now, because it doesn’t involve enough strategy. I would play my grandfather as he sat in his wheelchair. I played the black pieces and always lost viciously. I remember how he would peer, hunched, through his stacks of my murdered tokens at the game board. I remember how, after he’d beaten me, he offered to handicap himself by playing with his non-dominant hand.

He still beat me. I was stunned.

I always wanted to go fishing with him, but never did. I don’t like fishing, now, although it’s been a while since I’ve tried it.

My final memories of him are microscopically hollow. He was in hospice, and couldn’t speak. He was listening to something that I didn’t understand, and my dad only explained it to me as “one of his favorites. He’s listening to it so he doesn’t miss any of it.”

Now I know that my father could have meant anything– miss it, or miss it?

He asked if I wanted to talk to Grandaddy.

I said no.

Grandaddy died, peacefully, on August 16.

It was a wonderful funeral, now that I think about it. He had, it seemed, hundreds of friends that popped out of rich southern homes to pay their due. I remember my dad’s eulogy, but only some of it. He spoke. Something along the lines of:

“And Homer returned from his first year of college, expecting to continue living with his parents. Everything was swell. He made it back and enjoyed the company of his family, who had been gently nagging him to move out into the world. Only then did he realize, when he wandered into his room, that his mother had sold his bed…”

And the funeral hall quivered with hollow, smiling, wet laughter, still missing this wonderful man that I knew nothing about.

***

As a teenager, I became remarkably interested in business. I was interested in blazing my own trail, mobilizing people, managing a company, and trying to provide the best service possible. My grandfather was not on my mind. I asked my father about contracts and signatures. How did so much responsibility condense into a scribble on paper? How could you be thrown in jail for scribbling on the wrong thing? Why did you scribble your name?

I asked my father how contracts were signed. He explained,

“Well, not everything has to be written down. People make contracts all the time without signing anything. Any time you take something out of a store, you promise, like a contract, to trade money for it on the way out.”

It blurrily made sense to me. My father noticed.

“Writing is usually just the best way to make sure everything is good in the deal. If you write down everything that you’ll do, and the other person writes down everything that he’ll do, then it makes it really easy. Signing the bottom is just the way that the government knows you promised to do something.”

It became a little clearer. “So you can just make a contract on anything? Fake stuff?”

“Well it’s not fake stuff, but pretty much. Grandaddy made his money from a deal on the back of a paper napkin.”

“Oh, that’s cool. How?”

“He was a bookbinder. I’ll tell you the story later.”

And I waited. And he told me.

***

When a person decided to order a new carpet, the carpet company would send them a sample book, including all the small, cut squares of carpet that they offered so that the customer could decide which carpet they wanted. The company had to buy the books off of someone, and those people ran a carpet-sample-book-making company.

However, this sample-book company was having problems affording their binding. The binding needed to be unique for such a strange book. It needed to be strong but flexible, and the sample-book making company didn’t know enough about the business of paper-binding to try and streamline the process. They had been getting their books bound in New York for twelve dollars each.

They contacted my grandfather, who was in the paper-binding business at the time. They met in the 40th Avenue Cafe, and the company, represented by three men, brought one of the sample-books for Homer to inspect.

“We need a better binding.” The cafe clinked around them and blue winter light shone through the large windows.

My grandfather looked at the sample-book. “Sure. I know what you mean.”

The coffee steamed and smelled dark. The company representatives looked at each other.

“I can probably do this for a quarter.”

A pause. “A quarter? A quarter of what?”

“A quarter. Twenty-five cents.”

“For the whole binding?”

“Yes.”

Silence.

“I want thirty percent of the company.”

“Are you serious?”

“I’m the best paper-binder in Nashville.”

“We can’t afford that.”

“You can’t afford these books. Watch.”

And he sketched out the comprehensive financials of the company on a paper napkin with a pen he kept in his breast pocket. He looked up at the men.

A beautiful young waitress swirled in, smiling, with arms full of hot food. A round of thank-you’s tittered through the four of them. She left, and the men watched her leave. They looked back to my grandfather with their politeness vanished.

“Can you really do it for a quarter?”

My grandfather paused and his young eyebrows crinkled. “I can show you.”

He threw on his overcoat and asked them to follow his car to his office. His breath fogged after he shut the door, and he could hardly feel the keys as he clambered into the workshop. The men followed him in. The light flicked on, and my grandfather began to hum. He gathered the materials like a practiced craftsman, and the businessmen, suddenly apprehensive, shut the blinds and windows. Everything was illuminated by a single, bright bulb over my grandfather’s workstation.

He worked quickly– mocking up a sample-book in a few minutes and binding it securely. The men had never seen anyone work so fluidly. His hands danced. As far as they were concerned, dark magic coursed through his veins.

“Here.” my grandfather held up the mock-book, weighed down with lead squares in place of the carpet samples. He handed the still-sticky book to the representatives, who flipped through it, checked the binding, flipped it open and let it hang freely above the carpet, and were amazed when it held. They flipped it closed and blinked slowly in the dim light.

“How much did it cost?”

My grandfather shrugged, and counted some ingredients in his head. He looked at them.

“Thirteen cents.”

The men’s heads spun like roulette wheels.

“Or thereabouts.”

***

And thus my family’s small fortune was born on the back of a paper napkin. Everything was translated from the “fake stuff” to real, cold signatures scribbled darkly on official paper, where dollar signs really meant dollars and breaker lines split the page like pillars of the earth.

My grandfather was a father of three, like my father. He raised two girls, artists, and a grounded, working son. My dad was the youngest. Homer’s two elder daughters are my aunts– one is gently-estranged, and the other is so far down the limb in the family tree that she’s spying the ground, calling my father a racist with her glass full of his liquor, holding antique grudges like the bones of a lost Tyrannosaur.

My father’s oldest sister, Laura, is wonderful in the way an older sibling is. She took my brothers and me on trips, expeditions, and adventures that circled the town, the circus, and the state. I would sit on the roof with her and watch the garbage truck shake the trash can into its vast open bed. I rode an elephant in the circus with her. She’d pick me up from class and do the chicken-dance with me in preschool. When she was done, we ate Krispy-Kreme and threw rocks into the creek that lazily circled a nearby office building.

Laura is wonderful.

And she loved Homer.

***

In Laura’s senior year of high school her class took a celebratory field trip, riding a thundering bus in lazy circles around the city.

They couldn’t leave the state because one of her classmates had a recital in town.

In the mid seventies, the drinking age in the South was eighteen years old. The seniors took full advantage of that rule, typically, but the rule for this final trip was that there would be absolutely no drinking. It was a silly rule. The kind of rule that, when suggested, only causes students to look at each other, wink, and use solo cups instead of wine glasses. It meant nothing.

Left in the hotel one night, my aunt and a couple of her friends stole away into the boys’ room. One of the boys, known for smuggling and sneaking, ran off to the liquor store down the street to buy three bottles of rum and two jugs of punch.

The drink was sticky sweet and seductive. My aunt Laura says she can still smell it.

Having barely drunk two cocktails, my aunt, her friends, and the boys jumped at the sound of the door hammering. One of the boys, drink still in hand, automatically rushed up to answer it:

“I got it!”

Frantic tinkling of glasses and bottles answered this claim.

“Wait! No–”

“Shhh!”

“Put it under the couch!”

“Don’t answer it!”

Before rational thought could reach his mind, he peeled the door open and had his cup seized by the supervisor, Mrs. Susan. She, dressed like a sleepwalker with the eyes of a devil, hair in a frenzy, screeched at the students to “Give it!” The students sputtered apologies and excuses, and through the confusion, she grasped the rum and dumped it directly onto the hotel carpet. Its dark color pooled quickly into a permanent, blotchy stain.

The students were silent.

***

“… Mr. Brown?”

“M’yes?” Homer sat up in bed groggily with the phone. His sagging smile lines were illuminated by the glow of the table-lamp.

“Um, sir, we’ve caught your daughter.” The man stuttered. “Drinking, she was, on the class trip. And we would like for her to return home immediately.”

“Hm?” My grandfather scratched his beard. “Drinking?”

“Yes, sir. We understand your frustration and are sorry for any sort of inconvenience–”

“She’s been drinking since she was fourteen.” He yawned.

“Um, well, yes, sir, but I–”

“I don’t see any problem.”

“Well, sir, you see– it- it was against the rule–” And he was cut off by a violent handoff of the receiver. Immediately came the screeching, high-pitched tone of Mrs. Susan.

“Mr. Brown–!”

Her tone was different. My grandfather stiffened in bed. He was awake.

“Come pick up your daughter immediately!” She inhaled. “Never have I ever seen such disrespect in this academy– it is an outrage!”

“Ma’am–” he felt warm.

“I am awestruck! Completely bewildered– she’ll stay in her room for the rest of the trip thinking about what she’s done. And I–”

“Excuse me…”

She did not stop. “I think- I think– you should be ashamed of yourself for raising such a daughter!” The pitch was wildly high. “I ought to throw her headfirst out of the academy–”

“Don’t you touch a hair on her head!” Thunderous. “I’ll sue the school for every damn penny you’ve got. You work for me, miss. I could have you begging on the corner of 5th Avenue by nodding–” He paused.

The other end was silent.

“Give the phone to Laura.” My grandfather said.

Mrs. Susan handed the phone to Laura. On the phone, Laura was crying.

“Oh my God, Dad, I’m so sorry.” She coughed and broke out again into sobs, “I’m so sorry. I feel awful, Daddy, I shouldn’t have–”

“What were you drinking?”

She sniffed. “What?”

“What were you drinking?”

“Um, rum and punch.”

My grandfather sighed and rubbed his forehead. “Rum and punch?” He adjusted and swung to the side of the bed. “Could’ve been anything else. I thought I taught you better. Must’ve been too sweet.”

“Yeah, it was. It was.” She sniffed again.

My grandfather laughed imperceptibly. “Of course. You wanna come home?”

“M’yeah.” It was pitiful and quiet.

“Okay. I’m on the way over. Your mother and I are leaving for Chicago in the morning. You won’t even have to repack your bags.”

He heard her suddenly beaming through the phone. “Really?”

“Of course.”

Relief passed through her. Her voice was still quiet. “Thanks.”

“Of course.” He adjusted the phone to the other side of his head. “Okay, honey. Gotta go. I’ll see you in a second.”

He hung up.

***

I’m sure the shadow of my grandfather still windily wanders the streets of Chicago, shaped to the slender forms of my aunt and grandmother as they skipped the sidewalks. I’m certain their laughter still echoes in the finest hotels in the city, and the rum stain is still sitting silently in the carpet of an unnamed hotel. I know that the same gale that blew his overcoat blows mine.

In downtown Nashville, I know that a certain paper napkin, darkened with pen, bounces like a tumbleweed along my streets. I know that the binding glue, on his desk, is still sticky.

I know the lone bulb still glows warmly.

But I also know that he will never be behind my checker pieces again. I know that he’ll never tell me his own stories.

I’ll never fish with him. I’ll never know what he was listening to before he died.

The world may never explain to me the cause of the sticky-sweet laughter that bubbled in the funeral hall. He’ll never teach me to bind a book.

I wonder if he heard me run away from him in his final hours.

I can never ask him.

All that I know is that, to this quiet and brilliant man,

I know I never said goodbye.