Independent, intelligent, resilient, tough.
Impatient, withdrawn, awkward, sullen.
I’m at the high school to meet with Derrick’s counselor. I don’t know I’m about to say those words, don’t know what they’ll mean. I’m even mistaken about why I’m meeting Mr. Crenshaw, but there he is, waving me into the library. From his gentle voice on the phone, I’d pictured a small man in rounded glasses. I shouldn’t say it, but here it is: gay, I’d assumed. Not feminine, just soft. As it turns out, he is one of those overgrown men who take pains to shrink themselves. A bit heavy, yes, but moreso tall and broad and square, and so clumsy with his weight that it seems to be an act. I can’t help but picture him dying, twenty or thirty years out, from missing a step and tumbling down a flight of stairs.
His office is not a real office but a corner of the little school library, an open-air cubicle shaped out of bookshelves. He motions for me to sit in a chair too small for an adult but too big for a child. With him looming behind his desk, which is undersized or seems to be, I consider that he might be trying to intimidate me. But I am not intimidated. Long before Derrick’s father I’d dated one like him, a mushy hulk afraid of himself. I’d dated two, actually. But never for long, fearing despite all protest that they had gland irregularities and would just keep growing. Derrick’s father, on the other hand, had been small, scraggly, with all the manias that accompany it. An over-excited little atom. So I have my reasons for now preferring a sedate, monumental presence like Crenshaw who, realizing he might appear imposing, straightens and sits back, taking his elbows off the desk.
“Tell me about your relationship with your son,” he says.
Oh, I think. That kind of counselor.
Derrick has not touched the college applications forms I brought home. After a few days, I filled in his personal information, but the rest was still blank. When the counselor called, I had thought he might be my college admissions cavalry. But the college admissions cavalry does not ask that question.
Now he’s waiting patiently, failing to be small.
“My relationship with my son.”
Breakfast still exists, by force of habit. He’s up before me, writing what I suspect are song lyrics in a cheap composition notebook I suspect he shoplifted. He’ll let me cook a couple greasy eggs for each of us, and cut a toast into two triangles so we can split it. I ask about his homework and he grunts his little answers. He still says goodbye every morning as he shuffles out the door with the canvas duffel he always carries, a stained gray thing you could imagine an old Italian man using as a gym bag. By the time he gets home from school, I’m at work. By the time I get home from the drug store, he should be asleep, but is up with his room lit by his computer screen, and I don’t go in to check on him. No mother wants to know what her seventeen-year-old is watching on the internet at one a.m.
I’m the mother of a teenage son. If our relationship is less antagonistic than the average marriage, that’s a victory. That’s what I could say about it, if I wanted to say anything.
“I’m not around as much as I’d like. Single mom. He’s very self-sufficient. Latchkey, they used to call it.”
“I was too.”
“And me.”
“It can be good for kids, sometimes.”
I let it hang. He’d invited me here.
“Would you say he’s a happy kid?”
“Is a seventeen-year-old supposed to be?”
“What’s his family situation like?”
“Didn’t I just say?”
“Extended family?”
Mr. Crenshaw—he insists I call him Ted, but I do not—waits patiently for me answer. They must have a whole seminar on that expectant waiting in shrink school, and he’s very good. There he is, trying to establish himself as someone I can say all this to, but he is not. Though he is very gentle, he is freighting his questions with importance, as if being as forthcoming as possible is my only moral option.
Before I dropped out of college to raise Derrick, I had an internship in the natural history museum. It paid zero dollars, and it was the best job I ever had. I wasn’t even a docent or tour guide. Rather than a nametag, I got a daily sticker: VOLUNTEER. But I walked to work through whale skeletons and taxidermied jungle cats that bared their teeth at me. I stood behind a station with molded plastic skulls from australopithecus to homo sapiens. Guests could slide them around the touchscreen table and, if they put them in the right order, it would light up. Across from my station was one of those dioramas of early hominids. A leathery nude male and female were startled by a swooping hawk, their baby on the ground between them, swaddled in pelts. The male looked confused and angry, the female like she was terrified before God. Crouched in their primeval fear, their gazes didn’t track the bird but stared out through the fourth wall. Out, when the crowds were thin, at me. The figures had been built too close to the rail and the museum had walled it off with Plexiglas to keep people from touching the Neanderthal pubes.
During that time in my life, I could feel my freedom and mobility so keenly I barely noticed it. In the time since, I’ve felt instead like I am behind the glass of that diorama. So, here’s my trouble with the right thing: I have always been unable to do it. I can see it. A man in the Dunkin Donuts grabs his wife’s arm too hard, calls her something nasty; I picture myself telling him you can’t do that to a woman. That I’ll call the cops if he doesn’t let her go. Someone says something racist, in my head I know how to put him in his place. Yet, the me behind the glass cannot enact the thing I know to do. The hominid inside waves franticly. The normal people on the outside see an unmoving mannequin.
When Crenshaw asks about our home life, about Derrick’s emotional state, about my emotional state, I paint us as a little family that is overworked, nothing from a GAP ad, maybe nobody’s favorite in the world, but surviving well enough. I sense his skepticism; I can’t say I bear it without self-consciousness. And in my head, a narrative emerges from the more forthcoming answers I could give: maybe all your ideas about respecting his privacy are a cop out; maybe giving a kid enough “room to breathe” is dangerous; maybe, Lucy, you have lost control of your son.
Soon, he gets to asking me what kind of weapons we have in the house. Cooking knives, maybe a cast iron skillet. A rope, a wrench, Mr. Clue, I want to say. Probably a candlestick in some box in the garage.
“So this is some kind of investigation?”
“For now, it’s just an inquiry.”
There are only two things on his desk: an interview template of some sort, which to his credit he is not using, and a pamphlet on top of it titled, Safe Schools: Threat Assessment Best Practices. Crenshaw is looking at me quite intensely when I look back up at him.
“Is he prone to outbursts?”
“No,” I say. “Less than your average teenager, at least.”
He asks about a history of violence, about past drug use, about any previous therapy or treatment for depression. Derrick has had none of these. He asks me so many questions, I get dizzy from them. But there are two things I won’t forget.
“Tell me,” he says after a while, “what are four positive qualities Derrick has?” After I measure them out carefully, he asks for four negative qualities. It’s not easy to speak ill of your child, to critique him for a stranger. I think hard about my answers and say them slowly. But in the end, I’ll remember those eight words as being the most honest things I said to Crenshaw.
The other thing I’ll remember is the last thing he says. He says it just as I’ve picked up my bag and turned to go. He is holding up the pamphlet for me to take. “This is less official, and maybe it’s not my position to say, but I think it’s important. A lot of parents don’t know what their kids keep in their closet. Make sure you do.”
***
My son does not play video games, violent or otherwise. He’s never had friends over for Dungeons and Dragons. So already he doesn’t fit the profile. That doesn’t mean he’s not capable of it. Lots of people are capable of it. My manager at the drugstore. The assistant manager at the drugstore. Get into traffic on the Route 9, and thirty percent of your compatriots are thinking about it. But thinking doesn’t necessarily lead to planning. The pamphlet agrees with me on this. When a student warns his friends that something big is going to happen, when he points his fingers like a gun at some more genetically fortunate specimen, when he keeps a list of kids he doesn’t like in his locker, a threshold has been crossed. Derrick made some threats, Crenshaw said. Very veiled. Only suggestive. But plural, expansive in their wording. Enough to start an inquiry, it seems. Not enough for an investigation.
The easiest way to understand him is through the artifacts he has collected. He wears this trilby, faded black felt with a fake red feather in the band, that might as well have Goodwill stenciled on the brim. I don’t think he sleeps in it, but I can’t prove it. I don’t see him out of it, except when he lifts it to smooth his hair back. He has one jacket, a corny old windbreaker. I work at a drugstore. He understands that when you’ve only got one of something, it matters. He wears it every day, making it seem like a costume. He keeps facial hair you couldn’t describe without using the word “attempt.” When he was younger, I thought he might throw in with the drama kids. They don’t care if you’ve got money. They don’t care if you’re odd. He had the wit for improv. He might not have had the voice, but that’s the point, right? You learn the voice.
The other thing that travels with him always is that duffel. It was innocent once. One might have guessed it transported clothes for gym class. Now, what can I picture inside it but grenades and assault rifles? School attacks are not spontaneous, the pamphlet says. Attackers often take initial steps to test their resolve. Like taking an arsenal to the school, the secret of it pounding in your heart, feeling full of your own power to ruin.
I need to know what’s in that bag, of course.
But I’ve never been a self-starter.
Let’s see what happens when a mother must confront her own flaws to save her child! Let’s see what she does the one time in her life that the stakes are high!
I buy waffles for breakfast. I set an alarm so I’ll be up before him and have his breakfast on the plate. Since I did not think to get syrup, I spread jam on his and peanut butter on mine. I am munching my own waffle down when I hear his alarm go off. Five minutes later, he comes out in the last clothes I’d seen him in. He does not startle when he sees me in the kitchen, but his eyes do wander the room as if searching for a mousetrap. Then he shrugs and sits down. When he speaks to me, it’s in his usual dry, cutting way. The words he uses are banter. The tone is all barbs, pointedly unimpressed.
“What’s the occasion?”
“It never hurts to try a little harder.”
“You can’t say that to a high schooler. Trying hard is the last thing we want to do.”
“I’m thinking of starting running.”
He holds up his waffle. “Good start.”
Wit: there’s another quality I could have mentioned. But that’s not exactly a positive trait, is it?
What’s his family situation like? We used to go see my sister. Her girls had been sweet until, in adolescence, they’d become too much like her. Neither was as smart as Derrick, but they turned in their work on time and complete, on poster boards crafted with a neurotic Rotary perfection. What did it matter to teachers if there wasn’t an original thought on them? I’d take a thousand Derricks over one of them. Still, I tried to tell him, back when we used to visit, that a strong work ethic was worth as much, or maybe more than, a sharp mind.
“Look how well it worked out for you,” he said.
Oh, wit. How quickly he could shred my facile pride in being a key carrier at the drugstore, at my $16.35 an hour. Acting manager, they call me. Not a manager but allowed to act like one. Oh, his talent for finding soft spots. That’s what a sharp mind is good for.
A judgmental reader couldn’t be blamed for thinking that our family love was dead. It is true that we have become strangers to one another, but I do not love him less for it. After all, we can only love those who are strangers to us. It’s why we love our toddlers so dearly: the unknowable logic of what they think about, what they lie about, what truths they utter. The unfettered range of their thoughts. It’s also why we are able to love ourselves in our early twenties. We don’t yet know ourselves well.
“They did a free health screening at work,” I say. “One of the things it said was that I’m borderline depressed.” The screening had been two years ago. I leave that part out.
“Borderline, or depressed? Those are two different things.” Said like I’m a moron.
“I’m thinking I should take better care of myself.”
He shoves the rest of the waffle in his mouth rather than respond.
“And I’m wondering about you too, about how you’re doing.”
He chews carefully and washes his bite down.
“Describe your relationship with your mother,” he says. His impression of Crenshaw is not bad. I’m not sure what to say back to him. What was his answer to that question? What a terrible thing it would be to know; what a terrible thing it is to not know.
“Seeing a shrink doesn’t make you one, Mom.” He grabs the last waffle and takes it with him as he goes. He stops at the door to raise it up.
“These are good. Let’s make it a habit.”
I watch from the front window as he tramps off toward school. My eyes are on the duffel bag hanging at his hip. I can’t recall the last time I saw him away from it. To look inside, I will have to be strategic. To embrace the strategic, I will have to do away with some illusions: I am worried about losing my son, more than I am about the fresh-faced, high school strangers whose lives he might end; I fear living the rest of my life with my house under siege by reporters more than I fear either; and I have to consider the danger that I might be in myself. When you read about these shootings, there’s always a dead mom back at the house. She’s never a part of the tragedy. Just the backstory.
***
The pamphlet has a perspective. Safe schools begin with trusting relationships. Teachers and administrators can foster a culture of silence or an open culture. Students in an open culture will rat on—the pamphlet uses gentler terms—the kid who tells his friends, so-and-so will rue the day. They will help him find the help he needs.
I found this a hopelessly optimistic assessment. I remember high school. I remember what kids were like.
I never should have read the pamphlet before bed, is the main thing. I take a Benadryl but still can’t sleep, just feel on the downswing of a drunk. Trying to walk my mind away from it all, I find myself imagining Crenshaw on top of me. His bulk—that’s not a pretty word, but his body could cover mine like a blanket. From above, you would only see my hands and ankles wrapping the sides of his naked back. Whenever some old fogey dies of heart failure during sex, the old coital coronary, people say, Not a bad way to go. They might say different of suffocating into some unmapped patch of rib flesh. Still, there’s some unruly pleasure in the thought that he’d barely notice me down there, an enjoyment of one’s smallness, something like the enjoyment of one’s own odors.
Daydream at night, suffocate me to sleep.
In the morning, I know what to do.
I am fairly sure he does not take the bag into the shower. Especially if they are munitions, he would not want to get them wet. He takes long showers, though, for a teenage boy, probably average; so, I pop into his room and pull the duffel into the hallway. Just before I open it, I have what feels like a premonition: it is full of dead birds. I picture Canadian geese, the severed hoses of their necks limply curling.
I grit my teeth and unzip it.
Inside is a miniature army, so beautifully painted I want to cry. I don’t know the fantasy genre very well, but they seem to be either elves or Catholic clergy. Each unit—archers, spearmen, swordsmen—has its own Tupperware. The scales of their armored skirts are individually painted. The studs on the cavalry’s bridles, smaller than pinheads, are dotted with perfect yellow circles. The gemstones set in their helms almost glow, and the faces beneath them, in spaces that seem too small to fit even the most minute paintbrush, are delicately shaded and have distinct expressions and facial hair. In a larger container there is a collection of larger pieces: giant eagles, griffins, ballistae, and a mounted swordsman with particularly bombastic armor, both he and his horse in winged headgear.
And you don’t have time for your homework? I think.
Also: Thank God there’s no gun.
And also: It’s time to check the closet.
***
But I have always been a procrastinator. Always had to drum up some motivation.
Drugstores get all kinds of people. We get the Whole Foods customers and the Walmart customers. I guess everyone needs Viagra. The Whole Foods people scroll their phones while I check them out. The Walmart people treat me as one of their own. Our line of management succession follows a descending order of mustache. Mr. Collins heads home at five, and Mr. Venkatesh at seven. I don’t have a mustache, but I have something that acts like one. The night of the Elven army, my coworkers are the two high school girls who only work stoned. Always pleasant and lazy, they are my favorite people to work with. They don’t cause problems but leave plenty of slack for me to pick up, and I like to be distracted.
It’s the day after Valentine’s Day, and we still have twenty-nine dozen roses sitting in water buckets under a sign that says, HALF OFF. Written under that is Mr. Venkatesh’s joke: “If you’re buying these today, you might want two dozen.” The bouquets are mostly holding up, though the sweet smell of roses is turning into the cloying scent of rose perfume. The front of a store is a cloud that smells like an old woman’s couch.
Couch, I said.
But it turns out to be a quiet night on the heels of a quiet afternoon. The aisles are stocked, the floor mopped, the sales tagged, and I have no excuse not to take my breaks.
I’ve been carrying the pamphlet around with me like an unfilled prescription. Or perhaps an amulet, a ward, or something equally worthless. If I have it on my person, I am doing something about the problem, am I not? I am marinating the problem. I reread it over a tray of depressed tortellini from the freezer case. Transient threats, substantive threats. I am an expert in the pamphlet by now, in its stilted language. If a student tells others, “You are all going to pay!” or “I’m not going to take it anymore!” that student might be a serious danger to others, or a character from The Outsiders.
There is also an author listed: Eric Dormer, Ph.D., head of the Threat Assessment Lab at the University of Puget Sound. I find his phone number on the Web and checked my watch. 8:30 p.m.: rude, but not in total-asshole territory.
“Hi, Dr. Dormer. I’m a student at KU, and I’m writing a paper on your work,” I say, raising the pitch of my voice, acting chipper. I give the name of the girl working register. I do not apologize for calling so late; I’m pretending to be a student. I don’t have to pretend too hard. He says he appreciates my gumption. I hear toddlers screaming in the background.
I ask what led him into the field, what his methods are, what kind of questions he asks the students he counsels, what it’s like counseling potential murderers (imagine parenting one, I didn’t say), what it’s like be famous—buttering him up, as is easy to do to any man envisioning a coed, for the question I really wanted to ask.
“Does it actually work?”
“How do you prove a negative? Can you ever say this kid didn’t shoot up a school, but if we didn’t intervene, he would have? But I believe it does. It seems to turn around a lot of kids, at least when they’re in the system. A lot of kids go off to college, move out of town, don’t find a counselor. We hear a few years later that they killed themselves. Which is its own kind of tragedy, of course. But from the standpoint of preventing attacks, it’s a win.”
“Thank you. Good night,” I say, slouching back into my acting-manager voice. Let him make sense of the difference. I hang up the phone.
***
His room is clean but not too clean. Not psychopath clean. He’s left some dirty clothes on the floor, but in a single pile near the closet. His bed is not made, thank God. It would be hard to think of a worse sign for a teenage boy. I take note of the second army neatly arranged on the top of his dresser. Reinforcements, I suppose. Under his desk is a sock that looks like it’s been dipped in frosting and left out in the sun. I keep my distance. His computer sits dormant on a little table. I don’t bother with it. He can interface with it like a friend, I’m sure; but, I can only bark at it like a dog. But on his desk is the workshop of his esoteric, little genius: a scattering of delicate brushes; a crowd of little paint canisters sitting in a miniaturized wooden stadium; and, in something like a little bento box, there are tiny fake textures—grass the size of coconut shavings, pebbles of blue gravel.
A pewter dragon stands in the center of the workspace. It’s eight inches tall, sculpted to look like it’s launching itself from a rock promontory. Tufts of green grass are textured onto the ground, and the rocks are painted a realistic gray, but the dragon itself has yet to be painted. The spikes on his spine, the articulated armor on his neck, his teeth and tongue and eyes, all gleam a uniform silver.
Regal. Grand. Elegant. Ancient.
Fearsome. Dark. Vengeful. Evil.
He can paint it whatever color he likes.
Yes, the closet. So sparse when I open it that it breaks my heart. We don’t have much money, but I would have bought him more clothes if he’d asked. Some hanging shirts, thrift store stock. Knit hats on the floor, which he wore before he’d found the trilby. Posters for bands he used to listen to, rolled up and rubber-banded neatly, as if he might go back to enjoying their music. There is a whole archeology of his adolescent years. A baseball mitt and bat from before he stopped trying to be cool. Roller blades from after. Figurines from video games and movies that had been important to him. If I sorted them chronologically, I could demarcate the point where he’d stopped talking to me about his favorite things.
There is a metal box with a combination lock on the floor. After trying our address, his birthday, and a few other obvious numbers, I give up. He is too clever for that. But when I pick it up, it does not seem heavy enough to contain anything deadly. When I shake it, there is no clank.
And then there it is—always the last place you look—up on the top shelf. From my tiptoes I can see the butt of the black handgun, the rough patch on the side for grip, the almost sensually scalloped carve-outs for fingers to grip. Its uniform color makes it look like a toy, like molded plastic that’s been spray painted, but when I pick it up, its realness is innate in its grip and its temperature.
Any parent would know what to do.
And I can imagine doing it. Holding the gun by two fingers, putting it in my purse on the passenger seat of my car, handing it off reverently to Crenshaw. I don’t imagine confetti or pats on the back. I just imagine a look in his eyes of both relief and compounded worry for Derrick, and of thankfulness to me.
But I can’t do it. There I am again, immobile in my natural history diorama.
He’s a monster. I’m an australopithecus.
Instead, I put the gun into the pocket of my sweater, and I run off into the woods. Its weight won’t let you forget what it is. I run until I’m only vaguely aware of where I am, but still confident that if I run back the other way, I’ll hit the road. You can’t just leave a loaded gun in the woods for any kid to find, so I try to get the magazine to drop out. I push buttons, I whack it on the side—nothing happens. Movie heroes seem to make it fall out by willing it so. After five minutes, I give up and shoot off a round into a tree. Then I fire several more. Exhilarated, I spin around and fire the rest into another tree until the clip is empty. My heart is racing.
That’s when I really start to worry.
***
It is amazing that one can come to fear breakfast. But when it is the only time you see your son, a boy who may be incubating homicidal rage and who, either way, has always had a talent for bruising your feelings, you can come to fear breakfast.
Even if waffles are involved.
Yes, I bought more waffles, and now I fear I have given away all my negotiating power.
Look at him. He does not look like one of them. They have their shaved heads or ill-considered bangs. They have their eyelids that won’t close enough or won’t open enough. They tilt their chins forward. They looked bewildered. With most, though not all of them, you can tell. Derrick, when he isn’t paying attention, looks sweet. When he does not realize he’s being watched, his eyelids are heavy and soft, and his eyebrows relaxed. In the middle of his thin, harmless face, his lips purse gently.
“So are you going to shoot up the school or something?” I ask him.
How pleasing it is to catch him off guard. Then, after a moment:
“Are you talking to me?” he says. “Are you talking to me?”
How pleased he is to blow me back.
“Well,” he says, “I thought it was funny.”
“How often are you seeing Crenshaw?”
“He calls me in once a week.”
He seems to enjoy the mild interrogation, which gives me some hope that he might enjoy the same from Crenshaw, and that they might have some effect. After how many years, is this our common ground—not some sport or activity or band or show, but the risk of him snapping? I try to think of what to ask next, but he continues on his own.
“He asked me about you.”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full.”
I haven’t said something like that to him in years. I can feel that now it will keep him talking. He swallows theatrically.
“Want to know what I said?”
“I’m sure it’s the last thing I want to know.”
He wields his second waffle the way any salesman wields a prop.
“Diligent. Humble. Tolerant of ambiguity. Authentic.”
“Please stop there.”
“Hypersensitive. Brooding. Lumpen—”
“Jesus Christ.”
“It doesn’t mean lumpy.”
“I know what lumpen means.”
“Cowardly.”
“You want a ribbon?”
“Now do me.”
There’s more energy in his voice than I’ve heard since he was a boy. He seems happy. For a moment I feel he might forestall whatever plans he has just to keep me in suspense. I shake my head.
“Go to school.”
“You think you’re going to hurt my feelings?”
“Don’t forget your little toy army.”
That knocks some of the glee out of him. Not because I’ve disparaged his things, but because I know about them. He storms off with his bag, but I know that when he comes home, he’ll be taking an inventory of his room. Of his closet.
***
Sitting across from Crenshaw, I have the peculiar feeling of being in a children’s story. The giant sits across the desk from me in his office made of books. The corner of the library is poorly lit, and he has a little lamp that illuminates nothing but itself. I’ve come to tell him about the gun, so I am having great difficulty figuring out how to say anything but that. He looks at me and sees the motionless pre-human, while the pre-human wills herself to move: drop your arm, shift your face, say something. I see myself doing it. Saying, I found his gun. I threw it away out in the woods.
“Has something happened?” he asks.
The tourist stops. He looks at the display. Did he just see that ape move?
“Not really. He hasn’t been very nice lately.”
Just a trick of the eye, of course. Just a statue. Not even a real human. Not even a real ape.
“I have teenagers,” Crenshaw says. “That’s normal enough.”
Behind the glass, I am imploring him—but not what you think: I see myself telling him that the last time a man touched me was the day before Derrick was born. We were trying to stimulate birth. Derrick’s dad had been all over me while I was big. He was watching lots of pregnancy porn and had me watch some with him. He tried to convince me it was sweet. He stuck around for the first three years, but after weeks of waiting for me to heal and months of sleep-deprivation, our physical spark was dead, and he never brought it back.
And why am I sitting across from Crenshaw thinking about this instead of Derrick and what he might do? Because I may be dead within the next few days—a suspicion that had not occurred to me until just now.
Behind the glass, I am undoing the buttons of my shirt. Do you know how old he is? I imagine myself asking. Do you know how long seventeen years feels?
“I don’t think that’s going to help anything.” Crenshaw says.
look down and see my shirt hanging open.
“Does it have to?” I ask.
He holds his hand aloft and gives his wedding ring a twist.
“Was I saying anything?”
Bless him, he takes it in stride. He shakes his head kindly.
In perhaps the least meek act of my life, I leave my shirt open. I have stepped out of the diorama and am not going to step back in so easily. He can’t help himself from glancing, not luridly but as if he’s spotted a bug on someone’s plate. I feel a surprise of pleasure at his discomfort.
“So, what are you thinking?” I ask. “Is he going to do it?”
“There are a number of indicators we look for—”
“Spare me the official version. What’s the Vegas line?”
He sits back, unsettled, and catches himself glancing at my bra again. He looks out the nearest window, which is not close to us.
“It’s always mysterious.”
“And can you stop it?”
“We hope so.”
He says this without a hopeful face. Prod Crenshaw, I think, prod the pamphlets and the whole network and professionals, and there is nothing beneath. Papier mache. The world’s most disappointing piñata.
***
When Derrick gets home, he will immediately look in his closet. He will look into where a piece of him was and see empty space. And that does not seem fair, or compassionate, or loving.
Mr. Venkatesh is surprised to see me at the store so early. I am happy to see him. He will drive a hard bargain on the display of leftover roses, but Mr. Collins wouldn’t bargain at all. I ask for his best price for all of them. I remind him that his joke isn’t moving them out any faster. Then I fill my trunk and backseat with the dripping bags.
I should give him some great warrior for his army—walk into some shop never before trod by a female, ask the clerk for the most expensive elf. But that is not what I had to give. Nor is it what I wanted to give. I’ve never agreed with people who say you must think about what the giftee wants. That is how you give someone some of their own self, not how you give them some of yourself. The roses I have are turning dark by now. They shed dry petals every time you move them. They smell like an over-steeped tea. But they are what I have to give, and I have hundreds of them.
***
What drove the apes to evolve? Why wasn’t a steady diet of bananas and termites enough? And did they know they were evolving? Did they want to advance? Did they choose it? Think of the famous evolution diagram. It looks like one person learning to walk, and not even gradually. It looks as if an ape saw something up on a high shelf, reached up to grab it, and never came back down. It looks easy.
I wake the next morning with him standing over me, and I startle at the sight. He is right next to the bed, up near my head, so I am looking up at him the way you look up at a tall building. All right, I think. This is it. I look at his hands, which are empty. He sees me look at his hands.
“Happy Mother’s Day,” he says. I am so groggy I have to look at my clock for the date. It’s the middle of February. He’s said it so flatly that I can’t tell if he’s joking.
“Thanks,” I tell him, just as flat.
He smiles, then turns to walk out. Through the doorway, I see him marching off to school, his red backpack bobbing on his back.
Is he safe? Is the world safe?
And the answer, as always:
For now.
Ethan Chatagnier is the author of WARNINGS FROM THE FUTURE, a story collection forthcoming from Acre Books in September 2018. His short fiction has appeared in a variety of literary journals including the Kenyon Review Online, Georgia Review, New England Review, Five Points, Michigan Quarterly Review, Barrelhouse, Witness, Cincinnati Review, and Ascent. His stories have won a Pushcart Prize and been listed as notable in the Best American Short Stories and the Million Writers Award. He is a graduate of Fresno State, where he won the Larry Levis Prize in Poetry, and of Emerson College, where he earned an MA in Publishing and Writing. He lives in Fresno, California with his family.
Photo by taberandrew on Foter.com / CC BY