by Michael Cart
“Nowwwww!” she bellowed, squeezing her hands into fists and her eyes into slits.
Maybe I was curious about what somebody else might say if I left them the space right there to say it, but curious was all it was because it was not uncertainty. And when nobody spoke, I did.
“Whatever it was,” I said, calm, not unlike the good reverend’s “talk ’em down” approach, “we are gonna get through this together, Pristine.” Without giving it much thought, I bent down and retrieved the gun. Mine, with the six-inch barrel. Instantly it pulled all my attention. I could not stop admiring it. My heart hurt and thrilled at the same time as it caught every tiny flicker of light and brought it to its beautiful self.
“Gus,” she said. “Gussie?”
“Pick yours up, Pristine,” I said. “Everything will change then. If you just pick the gun up, hold it, give it a chance. I am so sure it will change everything.”
“It won’t,” she said.
“It will.”
“Get them out of here, now.”
“You need to slow down, baby. Don’t spoil things. I only want to share with you the most precious—”
“Choose.”
“What?” This was the first time I was aware of looking away from my Rossi revolver since I picked it up. Pristine’s unearthly radiant skin was picking up every bit of the facets of light the polished steel of the gun was. It was almost too much, the beauty confronting me like this was the inverted version of the whole rest of my life before. But to make me choose? Making me choose? Why should beauty bother to make you choose? Beauty has everything; why should beauty care? I always imagined beauty had no reason to care.
“I said choose, Gussie,” she said, still sitting on the floor where she had opened and ruined the finest present between two people of all time. Tears I never saw before started leaking out of her, carving lines down her amazing face. It was like watching March ice cracking over the surface of a perfect pond. “It is very simple. You cannot have me and guns.”
My heart was constricting, the wire digging, coiling.
“Pick it up, baby,” I said. “You’ll see. You’ll feel it. And we’ll be unbreakable together.”
Her head just dropped, her shoulders shaking as she stared into her lap where her sadness of hands tried to wring the life out of each other like two nests of snakes at war.
“Okay now, Gus,” the reverend said in that psycho-soother tone, like I was one of them. He put a hand on my arm and I slapped it away.
“You could have the bigger one even,” I said, “with the six-inch barrel. If that’s a better thing. We can try.”
She just wept harder, which constricted my heart tighter, and she would not look up when I begged her to look up.
“You can’t hold on to her with something like this, Gussie,” the reverend said. “If that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I know where I can get a working one,” I said, still looking desperately for Pristine’s face to come up to me again.
It did not. Reverend Saul St. Paul, who must have made his funny mother proud, took his hand off my arm and went to the lady, the bride, on his citadel-sanctuary floor. He said soft somethings that were undoubtedly the right somethings, and she cried a little bit less. Then he picked up the presentation box with half the present in it, and he brought it to me. As he handed it over, I felt the witnesses at my elbow.
“You’re kicking me out?” I asked. “So much for Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms in neon then, Reverend?”
“Come on,” said Charlie Waters Junior, tugging at just the right pressure on my right elbow. “We’ll take that last ferry out to the Big Island and back, anyway, like the original plan. We’ll have a fine time. And you’ll still have the guns.”
“It’ll be cool,” said Warren from my other elbow. Warren, who really was a good, good guy, after all.
I turned just before the exit. “Come with me on the boat, baby. Like we planned. The Lucky Buoy, just like we started. And like we planned. Please, Pristine? Please, like we planned?”
She was leaning into the reverend, who was giving her comfort now, like they do.
“I’m staying, Gussie. I’m staying here.”
I became massively, blisteringly aware of the gleaming polished steel Rossi .357 revolver still in my hand as we pushed out of the church and into the world and the six-inch barrel caught every bit of light everywhere in the universe.
LOVE PACKS HEAT
Eric Shanower
THE DRAGON
Francesca Lia Block
When they told me about the new law—that every teacher had to get the training and carry a weapon in order to teach elementary school—I thought they were insane. But then isn’t the whole world in 2022? It was the strangest thing. The idea of learning to use a gun when all I wanted was to read stories about little animals to kindergartners as they sat in a circle looking up at me with wonder brightening their eyes. Clap hands and dance with them. Fill the room with colorful letters and numbers, a cozy corner for the children to snuggle in, on a beanbag chair under a paper rainbow. Some of them cried sometimes and I wiped their noses and put bandages on their skinned knees. Once we had a petting zoo in the playground. There was even one of those nearly extinct llamas with long eyelashes but he was a bit ornery so we could only look at him. On birthdays we had parades, blew bubbles, decorated cookies, and sang songs. Once there came a man who played guitar. He reminded me of Jordan with the brown of his eyes and the fullness of his mouth, and one of the little girls, Mimi, noticed I was crying at that old song “Puff, the Magic Dragon” and came over and patted at my nose with a tissue.
“Don’t cry, Miss Adams, your makeup will get all runny.” Her eyes loomed large behind her purple sparkling glasses, and her braids were like antennae, picking up every emotion in a room. “Are you crying because Jackie Paper came no more?”
I was crying because Jordan would come no more. Jordan is my weakness and also my great strength. I believe he saved my life.
The day it happened seemed like any day, except for the snake man. We had free-play and story time and lessons and recess. And then Terry, the young man with the reptiles, came to show them to the children. They sat in their circle around him and he took lizards out of cages for them to touch, only on the back, tentatively with one extended finger. I was worried about bites and germs, and hovered with hand wipes. Some of the lizards had been abused, Terry said in his soft voice. He had rescued them. People had starved them, burned them with cigarettes, slashed at them with knives. “Because they could.” Those are the words he used. Terry then took a long, thick snake from its cage and draped it in my arms. I hid my involuntary shudders and smiled. The snake’s skin had the cold, opaque whiteness of congealed milk.
While I was holding it, the young man, Terry, turned back around from slipping a lizard into its cage and pulled out his .44 Magnum. I stared down that big black dragon’s maw of death.
My weapon was locked in the closet. This was a violation and I could lose my job if it was found out, but I refused to have a loaded weapon on my person while teaching babies. I refused.
People tell me even now that the whole incident proves me wrong.
But that day all I knew was that I had to save my children.
I stepped in front of them; I was still holding the white snake. The children cowered behind me. Some were crying. I could distinguish Mimi’s sniffling among them and remembered how she had held the tissue to my nose.
I said to Terry, “I’m not armed.” For a moment I thought, What if I was? Would I have been able to use my weapon on this young man? Would I have been able to engage in a shoot-out, with the babies behind me? For a moment I thought, You might have been wrong, Chantal. But I knew I wasn’t wrong. The weapons, that was what was wrong. All the available weapons in this world. And the lack. The lack of love.
He blinked at me with pink-rimmed eyes. I could see his hands were shaking, same as mine. But I couldn’t let him see me shake.
>
In the morning when I pray, I breathe. After Jordan died I had to teach myself how to breathe again. Sometimes I would wake in the night thinking of him and I would forget how to take a simple breath.
“Everyone here is going to die,” Terry shouted in a hollow voice, like a machine’s. “You and all of them.” He pointed the gun down and to my right, at the children who didn’t all fit behind me. I never wished so hard that I was bigger, big as the room, my body a human shield. “All of us are going to die.”
He fired.
The snake slid from my hands.
It took me a moment. It took me a moment to realize the shot had gone into the linoleum floor.
The children screamed and I only glanced back for a second to make sure they were not harmed. I could not let them see the burned-metal fear smoking through my body.
“My first name’s Chantal,” I said. “Chantal Adams. I’m twenty-five. I was born in Compton and I’ve been teaching babies for three years. How old are you, Terry?”
He didn’t say a word. Only his eyes spoke loudly. But they were not looking at me, those eyes. And I knew this was bad. He was lost deep in his own head, deep in the old lizard part of his brain where killing was easy.
“You take good care of your snakes and lizards. I can see that.” I tried to keep my voice calm, my body steady. I reminded myself that I had not shuddered when Terry put that snake in my arms. “Everyone needs to be taken care of.”
“Everyone’s going to die.”
My babies. Mimi with her purple glasses and her braid antennae. Xavier with his husky voice telling me all about trains. Taylor and Emmalee Rose, holding hands wherever they went. Barack, the smallest, shyest boy, who could read at third-grade level. After Jordan, I vowed I would never marry and have children. My students were my children. I had told myself I would always have hundreds of babies, a roomful of babies to care for and love.
I moved toward Terry and he pointed the gun at me again, straight at my face. I said, “I hear that, baby. I hear what you’re saying. I understand. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Life’s full of pain, I know, but it doesn’t have to be this way.”
He lowered the gun and stared at me in silence again, back to his silence. Which was worse? The mechanical-sounding shouting or the silence?
And then it wasn’t just silence.
There were sirens. His eyes zoomed around the room like trapped animals.
“Life’s full of pain,” I said again. There was a bitter taste in my mouth, and my ears were still ringing from the gunshot. “I had a fiancé. His name was Jordan. We were going to get married and then he died. He got cancer and died. Just twenty-one years old. How old are you, baby? You’re about that age, right?”
And then he looked at me. He looked into my eyes. He said, “I’m twenty.”
“That’s what I thought. Almost the same age as my fiancé was when he died. You know anyone who ever got cancer? After he passed, I wanted to die, too. I thought of ways to kill myself. I didn’t want to live anymore. Is that how you’re feeling, baby?”
There were voices in the hallway, and Terry glanced back over his shoulder at the door. “You haven’t hurt anyone yet, sweetheart,” I said. “We can work this out. This can still be okay. Let me help you.”
He raised his gun again. He pointed it at the cages full of lizards. At the white snake that had slid away into the corner. At me. And the children. They were whimpering. I spread my arms out as if I could protect my babies. I thought of Jordan. We were going to get married. The theme of our wedding was going to be ancient Egypt. I was going to wear a long, pleated, white chiffon Cleopatra dress and a gold headdress and bracelets up my arm and the wedding was going to take place in a white tent shaped like a pyramid. We were going to buy a little house and never move from it, unlike my mama, who moved me almost every year to a different apartment when I was growing up. Jordan would sell homes and I would teach. We were going to have three children. He was going to coach their Little League. Someday there would be grandbabies. Jordan and I would grow old together and die in our sleep. He was not supposed to die of testicular cancer at the age of twenty-one. Shouldn’t someone have found a cure by now? I was not supposed to be shot down by a gunman. These children were not supposed to die.
Terry was avoiding my eyes again. I said, “What’s been going on with you, baby? What brought you here?”
He still wouldn’t look at me. For a long time he didn’t speak. Then he said, “I’m off my meds.”
“Why’s that, baby?”
He looked up and then his glance skittered away, lizard-like. He mumbled words I couldn’t understand.
“What’s that? I didn’t hear?”
“Don’t like how they make me feel.”
“Yes,” I said. “I understand. Do you feel better without them, though?”
He shook his head no. “I almost went somewhere else today.”
“Where was that, baby?”
“To someplace that could help me,” Terry said.
“You’re a real good boy for trying to go get help, Terry. I can get you to a place where people can help you. If you put down that gun and let me help you, you won’t get hurt.”
“No one loves me,” Terry said. “So why should I care about anything? Why should I give a shit?” But he was asking me. Like he really wanted an answer. And there was feeling in his voice now.
“I love you, Terry. I love you like I love all God’s children. You see?” I gestured to the reptiles in their cages. “I bet you love your animals and they love you. You saved them. Someone burned that one lizard’s eye out with a cigarette and you rescued him.”
And then Terry turned back to me and looked into my eyes and his hands were shaking and he held out the gun in front of him. And he set down the gun.
Yes, that miracle truly occurred. Without violence, it occurred.
Just like that, he set down the gun and kicked it away from him.
“Why don’t you lie down on the floor there now? And rest your head and try to breathe. I won’t let them hurt you. I’ll make sure that you’re safe.”
So Terry lay down on the floor on his stomach with his head in his hands. I didn’t let my body buckle with pent-up fear, with relief, with gratitude—to God, to Jordan, to love, to whatever forces had saved me and the children. Not yet. I called Terry baby, and told him he was a good man for doing what he did, that he had done the right thing.
The police came in and handcuffed him and took him away. The children ran into my arms. Mimi and Xavier and Taylor and Emmalee Rose and Barack and Charlotte and Teddy and Tre and Zeke and Grace and Ivy and all the rest of them. I sobbed and shook so much I thought I’d break from it. I had not realized how afraid I was.
Instead of asking if I was okay, someone was saying to me, “Where’s your weapon, Ms. Adams?” But I didn’t answer.
And in its corner the white snake lay very still. And the lizards like small dragons were very still. And if dragons were real and could have wept, they would have wept with us for all the senseless deaths of little girls and boys.
THE BABYSITTERS
Jenny Hubbard
We knew why you started sneaking the dog in through the window every morning before the first school bell rang.
“This is Mary Poppins,” you told us, your hand brushing the top of the dog’s head. That was all the introduction we got, all the introduction we needed. We’d seen the news, read the papers, heard our moms talking to one another on the phone. We knew why she was here.
“She’ll be with us for the rest of the school year,” you said. “Every day.” We cheered, and Mary Poppins walked around the classroom licking our hands, wagging her tail, sniffing our coat pockets for crumbs.
Mary Poppins was a pit bull with some yellow lab mixed in. Your wife had rescued her from a chain in someone’s backyard two years ago, when Daisy was four. When Mary Poppins first arrived at your house, she had chosen Daisy’s sunny room, Daisy’s soft single bed, s
o you and your wife let Daisy name the dog. We knew, because you had told us, that Mary Poppins walked Daisy to the bus stop every morning and then walked herself back home again. And every afternoon at 4:00, there the dog would be, sitting at the corner, waiting for Daisy to step down from the school bus. People used to drive down your street just to see the faithful Mary Poppins at her post.
For the month after the shooting, we had a substitute teacher, Mrs. Mellinga, who didn’t know anything about the history of art. Her husband coached football at the public high school. On the day of Daisy’s funeral, which was private—family and close friends only—Mrs. Mellinga baked us cupcakes. “I’ve never been good with names,” she said as we licked frosting from our fingers, “but faces? I never forget a face.”
She was sitting at your desk when she told us this. We could tell she was trying hard not to look at the photograph of Daisy that we all knew was right there in front of her. Her eyelids fluttered. We thought she might cry, but she kept on talking.
“When they showed that boy who did the shooting on the news, I knew exactly where I’d seen him.”
We knew where she’d seen him, too. Jeremy Tong was two years older than we were, and half a year out of high school, the school where Coach Mellinga taught. He had gone off to college in August, but he’d been kicked out for reasons that were, just now, being revealed. He’d bullied his roommate, who ended up in the psych ward. He’d erupted at a graduate teaching assistant when she handed back a test he had failed. He’d come back to town in mid-October and begun working as a dishwasher in the cafeteria where Daisy went to school.
Jeremy Tong took smoke breaks in the parking lot. On November 17, before the first bell rang, he opened fire as children began emerging from the school bus that Daisy rode. The driver was killed as she rushed down the steps to tackle the shooter. She saved many lives, but not Daisy’s.
We had all met your daughter. On Veteran’s Day, Daisy’s school was closed, and ours was open, so she came to work with you. During our class, Daisy sat at a miniature table in the corner by the window with a pad of paper and a tray of watercolors. She wanted to know our names, and so, one by one, while you spelled them out on the whiteboard, we introduced ourselves: Marlie, Cackie, Spenser, Arielle, Caroline, and me, Julia Gray.