Trigger warning: This story contains content related to school shootings, including some very graphic scenes, which I know can be hard to process, especially with how politicized and mainstream this news has become in the United States. Please do not continue reading if this topic is too much for you; take care of yourself first and foremost.

The kids huddled under their desks.  After all of the drills they were used to the routine.  But no one was whispering or snickering this time; it was for real.  The children did their best to stifle sobs to little avail.  Teachers stationed themselves where they could provide whatever protection they could afford, wary and keeping lookout.  They were all trapped, unable to act, waiting to be rescued.  A few brave individuals texted the outside world, trying to minimize any light or sound or vibrations from their smartphones that could alert the shooter to their presence.

The shooter was older, having come to the school to make a point about something. The kids and the teachers weren’t sure what the point was or why they had been dragged into it, but apparently whatever the shooter had to say was going to be driven home with a semi-automatic barrage of bullets claiming innocent lives.  If this was a publicity stunt, sadly it was working.  All of the news stations had showed up; it was making national talk everywhere.  People were paying attention.

The shooter rounded a corner, surprised to find a lone boy out in the open facing away, no more than six years old… a sitting duck.  The brown-haired bronze-skinned child absently paced, as if completely unaware of the danger he was in.  His hair was neat; his clothes were tidy.  He didn’t seem to have any sense of upheaval about him at all.  He was clutching a stuffed giraffe, dragging it gently along by the tail.  He ambled down the hallway at a snail’s pace, one foot in front of the other. The giraffe bobbed along behind.

The shooter opened fire.  Nothing happened.  The boy didn’t cry out, nor fall, nor bleed, nor turn to face the aggressor.  He continued walking slowly and methodically like a robot, watching some distant point down the hallway where flickers of light caught specks of dust.  They glimmered between the smoldering haze of disarray and the illumination peeking in from the tiny skylight windows.  Time seemed to slow and pause.  The scene was bathed in yellow warmth, but cold from the presence of death.  There was a rift growing between the two figures, disconnecting them but binding them to one another.

The shooter shouted a string of profanities at the boy before firing again.  And still nothing happened.  The boy kept moving towards the faraway point upon which his eyes were fixated.  The shooter began to run towards the boy but could not close the gap between them.  Lunging towards the child didn’t help; the distance grew with each and every footstep, the hallway widening like a yawn.  The more the shooter struggled to near, the more the space between gaped open threatening to swallow them both.

The shooter began to veer to the side but no matter what he did, the boy somehow remained in full view with his back turned, seemingly unaware.  Frustrated, the shooter shifted further, perhaps to kick in a nearby door to hunt other quarry, or to find a different approach.  But the scene remained fixed; no matter where the shooter stood, twisted or repositioned, the hallway continued to stretch out in front towards the boy’s back, always angled away.

Finally the boy paused.  The giraffe dropped from his hand to the tile floor at his side.  As the stuffed animal fell, it melted into the floor and vanished into just another part of the scenery.  A voice echoed forth from the boy’s small frame, not the diminutive and naive voice of a child but the divine and booming voice of a god.  “Why?”

The shooter, still driving towards the child, stumbled slightly, taken aback.

The voice bellowed forth again, “Why do you kill?”

The shooter glanced left and right before taking a deep breath and stammering sharply in equally resonant tone, “No one will listen.  They do not understand the threat.  It is for the future of humanity.”  Bolstered, the shooter continued, fear permeating every word, “These kids, they just keep pushing.  They are turning the world towards evil with their irreverence.  They do not follow the true path.  Why?  Why do you question?”

“Humanity has no future here,” the boy answered.  “We have lost the path awhile ago; how long we cannot tell.”

The child turned to face the shooter, a glow radiating from his small frame, making it impossible to make out his features. At first it crept along the periphery of his silhouette but slowly it began to overtake him as he became more and more visible. The light bathed everything in its path, erasing all to its unspecified energy, white and hot and crackling with electricity. The hallway dissipated, tile and brick and securely locked & barred doors giving away to the white nothingness. The light crept further and further into the shadows towards the shooter.

“I follow the path of righteousness,” the shooter shouted, “It is for our own good.”

“There is no path of righteousness,” the light beamed as the boy’s form dissipated into its all-encompassing presence.  “Salvation knows only grace.”

The way that both voices lingered and echoed in that now expansive space would send chills up the spine of even the most stalwart.  Something about the discourse was immeasurable and otherworldly, outside of the realm of human understanding, timeless, eternal…  True. These were indeed the words of angels, or of devils; the difference between them not always as easily discerned as one might wish.

The light eventually enveloped both the boy and the shooter completely before erasing all; everything was absorbed.  The two became one and the same.  They vanished together in a flash, leaving an empty hallway and a discarded stuffed giraffe, the only remaining evidence of their presence in that time and place.

Time passed.  Minutes dragged on for what felt like hours.  An hour plodded along like days on end.  Slowly, doors began to open from the periphery.  Teachers emerged and took in their surroundings before finally calling forth their charges.  Once an orderly exodus of the building was complete, with all parties reconvening at their designated safe zones, police combed the building.  Neither the shooter nor the boy could be found anywhere.  Perplexed by the absence of the shooter or their body, a manhunt was called but yielded nothing.  No one knew to look for the child who was not there.

This story is a reflection upon the poem Call Me By My True Names by Thich Nhat Hanh. I first encountered his writing when I was working through some of my own struggles, trying to come to a place of radical acceptance and compassion, and I found some of the concepts to be very difficult because they reflected so much of my own hurt back at me. The anger was not serving me well and the fire within my heart that it fueled was not allowing room for growth, forgiveness, compassion or acceptance, and this took away my own power to heal.

There comes a point when one must release, to recognize the oneness of all of it, bound together by space, time and circumstance. This is a difficult and bittersweet place to be in, and I recognize that this story may seem ill-timed or improper given so much pain that is happening now in relation to the topic at hand. The timing of acceptance and coming into compassion differs from person to person and the paths we travel are winding and are not always clear, nor driving to the same ends. But that is why I chose to explore this, because it is in this most raw and vulnerable state that we come to those decisions of how to respond, of the people we choose to be… It is here that our human nature resides: good, bad and ugly. This is, in my mind, one of the greatest strengths of horror writing.

And feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or here on her website.