by Paul Griner
Oh, Otto, she said at last and ran her fingers over it. So beautiful. You’ve captured it exactly. But can you take it away? I don’t think I can look at it ever again.
I didn’t tell her about Liam’s version, on the other side.
The War on Easter
EARLY APRIL 2019
The coffee in my mug rocks as a train rumbles past outside my apartment window and I push the mug aside and open the folded-over top of the cardboard box. Most of the case of liquor is gin; it’s postequinox, after all. My phone rings and rings, then goes quiet and rings again. 193 unread emails, most of them probably junk, but some related to work. 194, 197. Unread texts and missed voicemails too; my phone buzzes with each arrival.
I’ve caught snippets here and there, and the voices sound angry, so why listen? And through the power of my current gincident, I know that a lot of the emails and texts are angry too, without even glancing at them. Who am I to ignore my new gin-induced superpowers?
That night, I dream someone puts me against a wall and holds a gun to my head. Draw the cop’s face! No luck. My hands are encased in big Mickey Mouse gloves, and every cop I look at, in person or in pictures, has had their faces erased.
Followers Over Friends
HAHAHAHA THAT LITTLE LIAM HAS THE WORST LUCK, HE WAS KILLED AT SCHOOL REVIVED HIMSELF ELEVEN MINUTES LATER AND THEN MADE HIS WAY OVER TO PAKISTAN AND WAS KILLED BY THE TALIBAN HOW MANY TIMES IS LIAM BARNES (FAKE VICTIM) PLANNING TO DIE IN SHOOTINGS? IS THERE A CASINO WHERE WE CAN PLACE BETS ON WHERE HIS THIRD DEATH WILL HAPPEN? MY GUESS IS GERMANY. THEIR GOVERNMENT IS TAKING AWAY GUNS TOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Two Hearts Beat as One
APRIL 9, 2019
They had lunch at Rosie’s Place, sitting in front of a wall-sized picture of sunflowers. Not wanting to appear paranoid, May waited until after they’d had salads and talked about their weeks to show Nash the Craigslist Missed Connections entries; she’d printed them out on a single blue sheet.
He smoothed the paper flat on the table and read it and shrugged and brushed off a few crouton crumbs with the blade of his hand. We were at the Sunshine, but those others? There are lots of Mays in this town.
She moved her coffee cup aside. I was at every one of those places. They showed up within days of me being there. Sometimes the next day.
Did you talk to them? He opened three sugar packets for his iced tea at once.
No. I didn’t talk to anyone at any of them. So how did they get my name?
I don’t know, May. The long spoon clinked against the glass as he stirred.
They’re following me. You don’t have to believe me, but I’m getting a gun.
Good, he said, patting her hand, which surprised her into silence. She had arguments and evidence ready, but now she didn’t need them. Emails asking about her upcoming vacations, a box of camping gear someone had put in her garage, her social security number painted on the hood of her car with nail polish.
I’ve thought for a while you should have one, Nash said, shielding the lemon as he squeezed it into the tea. She liked that he did that; Otto had always done that too. A bittersweet memory now. Any ideas on what kind of gun you want? Nash said.
Fever Dream
Liam on the beach at nineteen, shirt off, hair tousled by the wind, the new tattoo on his chest visible from twenty yards. Four large lines of script, inked across one breast. Smiling as he walks toward us, feet and ankles sandy.
How could you? May says, marching toward him, in her anger dropping the pink conch shells she’s collected. You know how I feel about them.
The script edged with red, as if highlighted; swelling, probably.
It looks awful, May says.
By then we’re close enough to read it. Four lines from “Good King Wenceslas.”
It’s the way you two met, Liam says, grinning. And it’s my favorite carol.
May runs her fingers over the ink. Well, if you were going to defile yourself at all, she says, her voice losing its edge, you should at least have gone for “Silent Night.”
Letters
A call came to the monastery, for prayers, after another mass shooting. I could not answer it, at first.
I had turned off the news when the headlines first broke, not wanting to see, to hear, to watch, as people ran for their lives, or collapsed when they heard the awful truth, or argued about the causes and solutions, or simply wept, overcome with despair.
I had already seen this before. And before. And before. And I knew I would see it again. In a day, a week, a month. That the places would vary, but that the news would not.
I wanted it to stop. You want it to stop. Nearly everyone does, and yet it doesn’t.
Even as I tried to ignore the news, I knew that wouldn’t help. That the pain and the hatred and the fear would go on, whether or not I allowed myself to watch and read, whether or not I grew angry or despairing, whether or not I prayed. And at that thought, at the realization that my prayers were as ineffectual as a lamb standing before lava, my heart misgave me.
Troubled, I took to my bed, my chest aching.
After a long period of silent contemplation, I came to realize why.
It was not my sympathy for those hurt that pained me, or rather, not just that, but rather that, buried in my doubt, small as a trembling mustard seed, was a reminder that prayer is at the center of the call to my way of life. Prayer that overflows into our service to God’s people, people who are both beautiful and mortifying. I could not sleep, because, long ago, I had been called to serve, and service means work.
Work means I must write, must act, must intervene where and when I can to help change this world. It also means I must pray. If prayer is a weapon not of this world, it is nonetheless one of our most powerful, and one I must use. Again and again, as necessary. As God demands.
So I began to pray, first to change my own heart—to banish doubt—and then to change the hearts of others, to find some way to heal our wounds. God hears us. And if we know He hears us—whatever we ask—we know that we have what we asked of Him.
Pain Releif
The tattoo hurt, like a cat scratching me continuously for seventy minutes. Not a bad spot in terms of pain, the artist said, holding the needle in her steady hand as she swabbed my skin with disinfectant. Worse in the armpits and inner elbows or back of your knees, she said.
Silver’s artist. I’d called for a recommendation, the tattoo parlor tucked between a hookah shop and an insurance agent, its plate glass windows cleaner than a bank’s. Inside, patchouli candles and acid rock, my least favorite scent and sound. I said nothing, of course; she was the one who needed to concentrate, and the rub of extra discomforts kept my mind from fully focusing on the main one. She told me it wasn’t a disorder that made her shift position so much, but a need to keep the sun from casting odd shadows on her work.
It was disorienting when her twin sister came and stood over me, watching wordlessly. They each had half a sun tattooed on one side of their faces, but she stood on the wrong side of her sister to make it whole and I wondered if that was intentional, if they’d come to regret it, or mere happenstance. The same questions I ask about so much of life.
Red around the edges now, and bruising. It looks funny in the mirror, four lines of reversed text on a shaved breast. I don’t regret it, but it doesn’t change my mood, so I crack open another bottle of Boodles, wondering what it would be like if May and I got half a son tattooed on each of our faces.
Jesus Nut
APRIL 7, 2016
Such a small coffin. Months after the other funerals, worried ours might reopen healing wounds, we didn’t have a public one. Even so, the church was full, with police and first responders, with most of Liam’s doctors and nurses, with many of his classmates and their parents. May’s sisters, a couple of my distant cousins, and a single local reporter, who came and sat quietly at the back after nodding to me, and who never wrote a word about it. Later, I sent him a painting by way of thanks.
No Z
hao though, at May’s insistence.
I wore my black suit; May a skirt and jacket, lipstick and earrings. All that would attain significance, for some.
Pictures of Liam, and of Liam and May and me, flashed across large screens on the dais. His drawings too, and his flipbooks, a couple of his poems. The minister gave his sermon, about which I remember little, and there were prayers, about which I remember less, and finally a call for silence. After that, it was my turn.
I didn’t think I could do it, but I made myself stand and walk across to the podium. For a long time I said nothing while the images repeated behind me. After a few minutes people begin to rustle, and after several more I heard some wondering if I was okay. Lamont checked on me. I told him I was fine and he sat back down and still I waited, and I made everyone else wait too.
I waited for May and for Liam, for Lamont and Latrell, for all the children and their teachers, their parents. Minute after minute. Eleven total, the length of time the shooter roamed the halls. And then I took out the pages I’d prepared and began.
I read the names of the children and adults who’d died, and I said, These forty-three children who were born in hospitals and homes, who had carefully chosen for them names and baby blankets and first day of school outfits, who took their first Communions, who were chauffeured to soccer games and swim lessons and play-dates, who had hugs and spankings, groundings and time-outs, who had their pets and friends and broken bones and July Fourths and seven or eight birthdays, who had their stories told on Instagram and Facebook and Tumblr, in tweets and letters and phone calls and emails, and these eight adults who told the stories of these children, who shaped and molded and scolded and comforted them, who died trying to protect them, all of them were sacrificed. They were sacrificed in a plague, and nothing will be done.
We debated the causes, briefly. Mental health and guns and absent parents, bullying. A surfeit of ease, the scandalous gluttony of souls harvested in violent video games, a lack of religion, a lack of cohesiveness, a lack of love. But history has already overtaken our history, and the plague will go on, with other children dying in other schools, and adults too, some of them trying to protect those children. So many of them gone, so many more still to go. So many passing, so many crossing over the river Jordan, the river Styx, so many at rest, so many at peace, so many beyond the veil, with their races run, so many dead and departed, destroyed, erased, expired, extinct, so many with their horses freed, their ghosts given up, so many gone to a better place, to their reward, so many gone the way of all flesh, so many gone west.
They’ve joined the choir invisible, met their maker, passed away, they’ve perished and begun to ride the pale horse, they’ll ride those pale horses forever.
Murmurs in the crowd, which meant I’d timed it right, a pale horse galloping across the screens behind me as I spoke, until it disappeared into the invisible darkness that lurked beyond, darkness that none of them had been ready for but that had come for them nevertheless. Into eternity.
I went on.
Forty-three children and eight adults have already made that transition, my lovely little Liam the last of them. My boy is gone now, he has become those who love him. What have we become, I asked, that we will sacrifice our children and do nothing? I have meant to do something, but I have been too busy, and now it is too late. Thoughts and prayers and grief, they are not enough, not nearly enough, for what has been ransomed by the blood of children. We must do something more. Each of us, all of us. We must.
Done, I folded my pages and tucked them into my jacket pocket and crossed the dais again and sat. May squeezed my hand so hard I thought she’d break bones. Lamont said, You’re a god now, like me. I must have looked puzzled because he said, We’ve sacrificed our sons, and for what?
I didn’t feel better, or worse, I didn’t feel anything at all, except an enormous absence.
Nearer My God to Thee
EARLY APRIL 2019
When the first victims were being buried, Dexter Fenchwood said that the shooting was God’s plan, that it had to do with our nation allowing gay marriage. He called on Westboro Baptist to picket all the funerals, alongside his congregation.
Three-plus years later, I showered and drove to his church, remembering him watching me in the hospital waiting room with that feral and predatory intensity, and pushed past the picketers into the rundown brick church and took my seat in an uncomfortable wooden pew, wishing I’d brought my sketchbook. The long narrow central nave, its ceiling lost in darkness, the dirty, arched stained-glass windows, the expensive video screens glowing across the dais; Fenchwood knew what mattered. People filtered in, nodding solemn hellos, and then, just before the hour, the last congregants hurriedly took their seats. You’re in a church, I thought. Why are you noticing women’s asses? But I didn’t stop.
Then the choir filed in in their black cassocks and began to sing.
Oh sisters, let’s go down, down in the river to pray.
Who will wear that starry crown? Oh Lord, show me the way.
Oh fathers, let’s go down, down in the river to pray. As I went down in the river to pray, studying about that good old way, and who shall wear that robe and crown, good Lord, show me the way. Oh sinners, let’s go down, let’s go down, come on round, oh sinners, let’s go down to the river to pray.
Startled, I shrank before those beautiful voices and soothing words; the power of song, of harmony, May and her choir, the beginnings of love. In my shrunken, inebriated state, I wasn’t sure those around me even sensed my presence. I wanted them to.
Fortunately, the nasty words of “Jacob Have I Loved, and Esau Have I Hated” restored me to full anger, and, just before Fenchwood strolled onto the stage, a video screen lit up, displaying in foot-high letters the message that, as of that morning, God had killed 6,959 soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that, since we’d sat down, God had cast 1,147 people into hell. As Fenchwood appeared stage left, the choir began a hallelujah chorus. They seemed to be singing his praises, not God’s.
I didn’t listen much as he began to speak, the fallen nature of the world, the 144,000 Jews God would save in the last days, and etc., because I was going by feel more than thought. It was something, though, those odd thin lips and the energy he gave to the parishioners, the energy he took back, so that he swelled and expanded.
Ten minutes into his stemwinder, which by that point had something to do with Jonah and the whale and drowning, I stood and apologized for the interruption.
I said, But sometimes I get loud when I’ve had a bit too much communion wine because I want to get really close to God. To commune with Him.
No one laughed at my joke. I turned to see if I raised even a smile but I hadn’t. A lot of puzzled looks, a few concerned—some of the drab, dreary women—a few angry or annoyed, the bucket-headed men. So easy to piss off.
I wondered what Liam would think, if he could see me now, hull down on the path for glory, filled with righteous indignation. That I was fighting for him, or leading him astray? But I didn’t want to waffle, not now. Oh, shut up, I said to that voice in my head, and evidently aloud as well.
I didn’t say a word, Fenchwood said. But I will say this. When God speaks, you can’t listen with your mouth.
He stood utterly still on the dais, with his peculiarly filament-thin blond hair glowing in a spotlight, and I remembered reading that he played the cello. The man of God who fulminated against gays and Muslims and protested at funerals loved Beethoven and Bach.
God’s ways aren’t mysterious, I said. They’re moronic.
Calmly, he said, Brother. You seem to want to witness.
Oh yes, I said, swaying. I’d stood up too fast. I held on to the pew in front of me for balance or thought I did, but really it was a woman’s shoulder, some ghastly yellow flower pinned to orange-and-white stripes, the fabric crinkling under my hand. I didn’t want to hurt her, or not much, so after one last thrilling squeeze I let go and said, I hear you talk about God’s plan a
lot, how the shooting of small children was part of that, so I wanted to ask. If I shot you, would that be part of God’s plan?
The devil’s, he said, not skipping a beat.
Oh, yes, I said, making my way out of the pew past people pushing their knees aside so I wouldn’t tread on their feet. They moved so fast I might have been molten, and perhaps I was. Thought so, I said. When I got to the aisle a couple of larger men were making their way hurriedly toward me from the back of the church but not running, not yet. I didn’t have a gun. A few seconds, I figured.
I reached into my coat to make them nervous and said again, Thought so. Then added, Because you’re a fucking coward.
Self-Medicating
EARLY APRIL 2019
My lips close around Palmer’s nipple and she shivers, a dream so real the bed vibrates. Not the bed, I realize, coming awake, my phone, and squint to make it out.
Should have known you wouldn’t come through, the message says. Free? You get what you pay for.
At first I think it’s one of Lamont’s cryptic texts but the number isn’t his. Brain racking until I come up with a name: Homer Brannock, the fishing store owner in Vermont.
You’re fucking straight, you get what you pay for! I say aloud. My voice startles me. I’ll tell you what! I say. You’ll get something, all right! Just you wait!
At my drawing table, I sweep aside half-empty bags of Doritos and a leaking carton of chicken fried rice to get started.
A Gift for Homer Brannock, to Assuage His Anger at HAVING BEEN LET DOWN
Two Cats Away from Insanity
Having discovered the company that makes Kate’s videos, I type Forward Solutions into Snov.io, hoping she’s a regular employee. No luck, so I search the company website until I find the head of Human Resources. Her I write directly, using my business email address, and say I’d like to cast her.