Flowers, Metal, and Humans

Why should springtime exist out there? Where other children eat cake and sing harmonies, where other adults keep the children safe just by telling them to avoid danger. Why, when here, children's held breaths are forever silenced, adults giving their lives yet are not able to keep the children safe?

Let me break it down for you. There was a victim and a perpetrator. It was a gun that did the job. A gun is a shiny and polished piece of metal. The victim and the perpetrator stood at the two opposite ends of the metal.

The word humane traces to the Latin root humanus, meaning 'of man'. The action could not have been more 'of man'. The victim and the perpetrator were both human. The piece of metal was made by a human, who shaped it with precision and assembled it for other humans to use. So everything about the action must have been humane.

The story could have been twisted a thousand ways, each word manipulated to carry the weight of the preceding tears and frustration. But without the filters, it was simply this:

He stepped between the human at one end of the metal and the human at the other. It didn't change the outcome. In the end, the human on one end of the metal was alive, and the human on the other end of the metal was not. Anyone could have understood that.

I guess I couldn't. Because my mind played and replayed the scene. The metal, the human, the stain on the white shirt.

My mind rewinds. The door flying open, the sharp tip of the metal finding its way to the target, the sudden lunging forward, the finger pulling the trigger. The videos littered my memory in fragmented pieces, played in slow motion. They were broken into the smallest possible bits, slowed down to frame-by-frame static images with fuzzy outlines, yet were still indigestible.

The metal had planted a seed, through his skin, through his muscles, through his ribcages. The seed settled in his heart. Flowers bloomed through the ribcages, through the muscles, through the skin, bright and brilliant. Petals poured out of the wound like brewed wine, spilling onto clean tablecloth.

And the scene would not stop playing in my head. The sputter of the liquid, color as raspberry jam, texture as honey. The blink of a drop, followed by a gush, followed by a pressurized flow of spilt life.

It was like an arcade game machine, dispensing a long stream of tickets when you win the grand prize. The perpetrator had hit the Jackpot on his victim. His tickets were rolling out, waiting to be exchanged for a prize.

The victim was from Tennessee. His name is Mr. H. He loved cats and taught History. He was barely above our age, 24, and in his first year of teaching. He talked about WW1 and WW2, as we studied in depth and wrote countless essays about the scales of human violence. But now, violence played out in front of us as the bare minimum. And it was just that simple: a piece of metal and two humans.

My mind had played and replayed that scene so much that it seemed jumbled and distorted. The flower emerges from the gunpoint, the killer steps forward to block the shot, the shot was aimed at me, the tables and chairs were piled like a dumpster, the whiteboard flashing images of buildings on fire. And the life that spilled out of his chest was not life, but red roses and spider lilies and wild poppies. It looked like a Valentine's Day bouquet, given to someone you'd love for your life.

And the saying became literal, the love of his life, as he died to save the student. The sacrifice was so monumental, yet completely unthought of when he made the move.

Two humans, one metal, one field of lost flowers bloom.