He couldn't believe how easy it was... he put the gun into his face...

-BANG-

So much blood for such a tiny little hole...
Problems do have solutions, you know.
A lifetime of fucking things up fixed...
In one determined flash...

Everything's blue in this world, all fuzzy... spinning out of my head...




July 30, 2000... Southern Illinois...

Sunday morning. The sun shines brightly upon this small town, the place Kai has come to call home. Like most sane people, Kai is still asleep, even as the sun climbs higher in the sky and lights upon his window. Blissfully unaware of the outside world, he dozes peacefully.

Downstairs, Crimson and Melkor have already woken from the previous night's drunkfest. Neither is much the worse for wear, and both of them are content to simply watch the inanity of Sunday morning television for the moment.

Outside, in the cul-de-sac parking lot of the apartment complex, children are running around, making incredible amounts of unnecessary noise. Only children could possibly have this much energy this early on a Sunday morning. They don't yet know that Sunday mornings are for two things, and two things only: sleep, and football.

Two of the children moving through the parking lot that bright Sunday morning are Kyle and Brent, both nine years old and best friends in the whole world. After a hard morning of dirt biking down by the river, Brent's Aunt Shelly has given them the key to her brother Jim's apartment, with the admonition that the two of them stay out of trouble until she joins them there later. It is toward this apartment that the two youngsters walk now, wondering to themselves what to do with the rest of the day.

"This sucks," Kyle mopes. "What are we supposed to do in your Uncle Jim's smelly old apartment all day long?"

"I don't know," Brent responds. "Maybe watch TV? I have no idea. I haven't been to Uncle Jim's in months."

Brent inserts the key into the apartment door, and seconds later they are inside the apartment. Various articles of clothing are strewn about the shabbily maintained living room; an old, second-hand television sits on a coffee-stained end table propped up by the "N-O" edition of the 1975 Encyclopedia Brittanica; beer stains and empty beer bottles lay scattered about like strange castaways from some insane battlefield. The house smells of beer, self-hatred, and human shit.

"What a dump," Kyle laments. Brent sadly agrees.

Next door, Kai has finally woken up. Glancing at the clock, and noting the bright green numbers- 11:00- he gingerly gets out of bed, doing his best not to awake the other sleeping occupant. Stumbling downstairs, he finds Crimson and Melkor awake. After bullshitting for a bit, they watch an utterly FASCINATING documentary about Mexican stoneworking, then a program about installing a supercharger on a Honda. Sometime during the intriguing television programming, Sabina joins the party in the living room. Drinking warm Coke and munching on crackers, they sit zoned out in front of the tube, each one of them with messed up hair and rumpled clothes. None of them really gives a shit HOW they look, though- it's Sunday morning. Who cares?

Sitting on an ancient, stained sofa with only a single wall between him and the congregation of whatthefuckers next door, Kyle begins to get restless. "Man, your uncle doesn't even fucking have cable?" he whines. "This sucks, Brent. Isn't there anything else we can do?"

"I dunno, Kyle," Brent says.

"I'm hungry," Kyle continues. "Do they have anything to eat in here?"

Brent shrugs. "Let's look," he says. "There's bound to be something in there."

The two of them raid the kitchen, searching amidst piles of dirty dishes, half-empty cans of soda, full ashtrays, and more beer bottles. Throughout their search, they come up empty. The cupboards are bare of edible food, and the fridge has nothing more than beer, condiments, and foil wrapped packets of mystery meat.

Kyle is getting pissed by this point. "Shit," he grumps. "Can't do ANYTHING in this place. What's upstairs?"

Brent shrugs. "Just Uncle Jim's room, I guess."

Kyle gets a mischievous look on his face. "Let's go see."

Brent shrugs again. "Whatever," he says, resigned to finding nothing interesting up there, either. The two nine year olds ascend the stairs.

Meanwhile, Crimson and Melkor have decided to leave, and they bid Kai and Sabina farewell. Good-byes are exchanged all around, and Crimson and Melkor go to their car and head back for home. Suddenly deprived of entertainment, Sabina puts in "Braveheart," and the two of them settle down to watch it.

Their conversation inevitably turns to a sour topic, one that has given them trouble over the past few weeks. Two of their roommates are moving out shortly, one of them on less than a month's notice. Kai and Sabina are both unemployed, and their financial situation is deteriorating by the day. Facing a load of bills they may not be equipped to pay, the level of stress in the house has risen to the boiling point. Their desperate search for jobs has left both of them with frayed tempers and short fuses.

As the movie begins, the two of them are having their first argument. Naturally, it is about money, or their lack thereof...

Uncle Jim's room is no better than the rest of the house. In fact, in some ways it is worse- dirty underwear litters the floor, and within a few moments his carefully hidden stacks of Playboys are discovered by the nosy kids raiding his room, searching through its crusty closets and shelves like children in some sort of third-world Toys R' Us.

The boys are quickly bored with the novelty of staring at pictures of nude, plastic-enhanced stick figures of women. Putting the magazines aside- oh so carefully aside, so as not to arouse suspicion the next time their rightful owner peruses them, they turn to Jim's closet.

Opening the closet reveals garbage bags full of unlaundered thrift shop clothes, cardboard boxes with hundreds of broken garage sale trinkets haphazardly stuffed inside... and seven firearms. Three long rifles, a double barrel shotgun, and three pump action shotguns.

"Whoooaaaa..." the kids exclaim in awed unison.

In their room, Sabina and Kai are watching Mel Gibson as William Wallace wooing his Murron. Their argument about their money situation has ended, with Kai telling her that if she gets a job, he'll drive her to it. Sabina, totally lacking faith in her own car, agrees to ride with him until she can get enough money to fix her car... IF she gets the job. Kai, of course, is still waiting for callbacks from several places... and simultaneously damning whatever god there is that he will have to wait ANOTHER fucking year before he can start college. In silence, they watch as the onscreen Scottish lovers exchange their marriage vows.

Kyle and Brent are standing in the middle of good ol' Uncle Jim's bedroom... the most heavily armed nine year old boys on their block. Brent is holding a .223 Remington long rifle, working the lever action over and over, admiring its loud KA-CHAK! Kyle holds a 12-gauge pump-action Winchester, silently admiring its sleek lines.

"Hey, I bet we could have fun with THESE!" Brent suggests slyly.

Kyle giggles mischievously. "Yeah, I bet we could too!"

"AAAARRRRMYYYY!!!" the two scream simultaneously. Brent runs across the room and dives for cover behind the unmade bed. Kyle rolls behind a chair, and the two of them begin acting out their own version of trench warfare.

"BANG, BANG!" Brent yells, poking his head just far enough over the edge of the bed to take careful aim at Kyle with his .223.

"BANG, BANG, BANG!" Kyle screams back, working the trigger mercilessly. Kyle notices to his frustration that for some reason the trigger won't depress all the way... "Maybe if I move this button on top?" he wonders to himself.

Brent ducks down for cover behind the bed again. For several moments, he simply remains hidden. Kyle slowly... ever soooo slowly comes out from behind his chair hiding place, padding softly toward the bed, holding his shotgun against his shoulder just like they do on COPS, taking careful aim...

Brent finally pops his head out from behind the bed, rifle at the ready...

BANG...

William Wallace is just now saving Murron from her would-be rapist when Kai and Sabina hear a loud thumping noise. "Whatthefuck was that?" Kai wonders aloud.

"I dunno," Sabina replies. "It sounded like something fell over downstairs. Go check and see if Casey's getting in the trash."

Kai's face screws up in loathing. "That goddamned dog," he grumbles, throwing the covers off of himself. "I swear, if that little bastard's gotten in the trash again, I'm gonna KICK HIS ASS."

Kai walks downstairs, expecting to see any number of shredded items of trash strewn about the kitchen. "Casey-dog!" he calls. "Where you at, ya little shit."

Looking at the floor, he sees nothing amiss, aside from the puddle of dog piss on the carpet. "You fuckin' dog," he sighs in exasperation. At that point, Casey the puppy walks into the kitchen, wagging his tail and cocking his head at Kai, seeming to ask him, "What? What'd I do?"

"Fuckin' little asshole!" Kai scolds the dog, flipping him the bird. Casey continues wagging his tail and panting dumbly.

Kai goes back upstairs, walking back into the room and climbing back into bed. "Did he get in the trash again?" Sabina asks him.

"No," Kai replies, "but the little fucker pissed on the floor."

"Oh, great," she sighs. "I wonder what that noise was, then?"

"I dunno. Must have been the neighbors," Kai says.

"Must have," she agrees. The two of them return to the movie.

"An attack on the king's soldiers... is the same as an attack on the king himself!" the British Magistrate declares, drawing his blade across Murron's throat. Blue eyes widen, then dazedly slip closed as Murron bleeds her last...

Kyle lies on the floor numbly. The shotgun lies on the floor next to him, barrel still smoking. The air is filled with acrid smoke, and his ears are ringing. His right arm is completely numb from the shoulder down, and his butt hurts from landing on it when he was knocked to the floor.

He lies on the floor like that a long time, mind numbed into stark disbelief. Finally, snapping out of his fog, the nine-year-old sits up and cautiously pokes his head over the edge of the bed.

Brent's body lies immobile on the floor behind the bed, a dark wet stain spreading on the carpet. The wall and the adjacent window are smeared with great gouts of blood, chunks of bone, and other things too horrible to comprehend.

Kyle moans in dumb horror. It isn't real, he tells himself, it CAN'T be real...

On shaking legs, with terrified tears streaming down his face, Kyle gets to his feet and slowly, ever so slowly walks across the room, eyes fixed on the impossible thing lying bleeding on the floor five feet away.

Breathing hard, chest heaving with the effort of holding back his sobs, Kyle reaches Brent's body and looks at it, and the last bit of sanity flees him. Brent's face is... gone.

Most of his HEAD is gone...

Three thousand enraged Scotsmen hurl themselves bodily against ten thousand overconfident English soldiers, and the Battle of Stirling rages in all its blood-soaked glory. William Wallace weaves his way through the English, hewing and hacking at any who get in his way. Men die by the thousands- limbs are hacked off, eyes are gouged, brains are smashed, and skulls are cloven.

Kai and Sabina watch it all in silence, unaffected by the vivid depictions of rabid, medieval violence. Kai's stomach growls. Sabina smiles at him curiously, then turns back to the movie.

More loud thumping noises interrupt their movie viewing yet again. "That goddamned dog," Kai sighs in exasperation. Sabina sighs as well. "Yeah, he's a goddamned diggity-dawg."

"I'm hungry," Kai decides.

Sabina smiles at him. "Well, why don't you go down and get something to eat?"

"I will, after this battle's over," Kai responds, and raptly watches as William beheads the English commander. Kai laughs. "There can be only one!" he grins.

Sabina laughs along with him, as the Battle of Stirling rages on...

Kyle runs down the stairs, holding the shotgun firmly in his hands. His nine-year-old mind refuses to comprehend the enormity of what has just happened... all he knows to do is to try to hide what has happened.

Throwing open the back door, he glances outside to make sure no one is watching. When he is sure it is safe, he quickly runs across the open field, nearly eighty yards in broad daylight and in clear view of dozens of windows. Reaching the back end of the local mini-mart, he reaches his goal- a large brown garbage dumpster. Taking one last look to make sure no one is watching him, he lifts the lid of the dumpster and throws the still-warm shotgun inside.

Kyle runs back across the field, runs inside the apartment, and slams the door behind him.

Nobody saw a thing.

Sabina and Kai continue watching Braveheart, totally unaware of what's taking place only a dozen feet away from them. More muted thumping noises from next door fail to tear their attention away from Scotland's daring fight for independence from tyranny.

The mattress Brent's lifeless body lies upon is soaked with the bright red proof of tragedy. Without a sound, working like an automaton, Kyle slowly undresses his dead friend, taking each article of clothing to the sink and carefully washing them one by one. The pants only have the barest drops of blood on them, and his shoes are nearly immaculate... it is the shirt that is beyond recovering. The various bits of the more solid gore have been washed away, but the white t-shirt remains an accusatory shade of pink...

Slowly, almost reverentially, Kyle dresses Brent again. Eyes empty and unblinking, he stands at the foot of the bed for a moment, looking at the carefully arranged corpse for a long time. Then, soundlessly, he drags the mattress and its pallid occupant off of the bed, and straining with effort, he pulls it down the stairs after him, the sickening THUD, THUD of the mattress against the stairs like hammer blows against his soul.

Opening the back door once again into the bright Sunday afternoon, Kyle, tears still mutely streaming down his face, drags the mattress out into the fenced-in backyard. Even the cheery rays of the sun on that day cannot lend any semblance of life to the boy on the mattress- he is undoubtedly, irretrievably dead. Without a backward glance, Kyle reenters the apartment, shutting and locking the door behind him.

Five minutes later, Mike Harwell, a sixteen year old kid of the neighborhood and next door neighbor to good ol' Uncle Jim, is walking across the field between the mini-mart and the back door to his house. With the sullen preoccupation of a teenager, he almost doesn't notice that anything is amiss as he walks through his backyard up to his door... but what he sees on the other side of the five-foot high wooden fence makes him do a double take.

No way... he thinks... no FUCKING way...

Thirty seconds later, his groceries forgotten, Mike is on the phone with 911 emergency.

Half an hour later, tape 1 of Braveheart has ended with King Edward the Longshanks wondering whom to send to deal with the "bloodthirsty savage" to the north. Given the break in the story, Kai decides that now at last is the time to get something to eat. He goes downstairs, dodging the puddle of puppy piss on the floor at the foot of the stairs, when he notices a detective standing outside the back yard of the next door neighbor's apartment, talking soberly with a uniformed cop and taking notes. Scratching his head in wonderment, Kai goes to the living room and lifts the venetian blinds just so, getting a glimpse of the parking area outside.

"Fuckin' a," he whispers to himself. "Cops everywhere!" And indeed they are... virtually every police car in the county is parked outside the apartment complex.

With a nonchalance born of years of exposure to violence, a war in the Middle East, and living in Los Angeles for two months, Kai simply shrugs, goes back into the kitchen, and makes a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for himself. Idly chewing on it in the center of the kitchen, he greets Sabina as she trudges down the stairs and gestures with the remnants of his lunch toward the back door window. "Cops," he says by way of explanation.

"What's going on?" she wonders aloud.

Kai shrugs again. "I dunno, maybe there was a domestic dispute or something. Or a raid," he adds more quietly, thinking of their two pothead roommates and how only two nights before those same potheads had been smoking opium in the living room.

"Huh," Sabina says, grabbing a Pepsi from the refrigerator and popping the top.

Mildly interested in the proceedings outside after all, Kai positions himself in the kitchen at an angle to the window, such that he can see out without himself being seen. All he sees are scenes out of any episode of any cop show in existence: several out of shape men in bad suits looking terribly concerned and serious about everything, and uniformed cops running around in a miasma of human chaos.

"I'm gonna take a shower," Sabina tells him.

"Mmmo'kay," Kai mouths around a faceful of sandwich. They kiss after he finishes chewing, and she bounds back up the stairs.

Moments later, the phone rings. Kai, not knowing whether or not to pick it up under the circumstances, decides to do so on the third ring. It is Sabina's girl roommate's mom, wanting to know what is going on next door to them. Kai informs her that he has no idea, but that her daughter is not here, and therefore most likely perfectly safe. Thus placated, the mother bids him good-bye and hangs up.

Still looking out at the cops doing cop things, Kai gets a Coke and swigs it down, savoring the acid burning down his throat almost as much as the caffeine. Then the phone rings again. The roommate's mother again, this time with The Story as She Heard It...

Kai thanks her and hangs up the phone. Instantly, part of him shuts itself away... that part of him that might be the least bit affected by the fact that a nine year old kid got his head blown off with a shotgun by another nine year old kid. And this was not in Columbine, not in Los Angeles, not in New York City, not even the strip joint down the street. This was not some nameless face on a "Why, why, why," anti-gun legislation commercial. This happened NEXT DOOR to him. Still, through years of practice, he refuses to let it get to him... and therefore it doesn't. For now.

Sabina, on the other hand, is well shaken by the news Kai brings her upon her emergence from the bathroom. "Why didn't we hear anything?" is all she can wonder...

It is several hours before Brent's parents can be located and informed of the day's events. Until then, by law, his body stays where it is found... in the back yard, in the sun... in the heat. Not until night falls on the sleepy village is his body finally hauled away to the coroner's office. When night at last chokes the day away completely, the procession of police slowly dwindles away, and peace returns to the apartment complex.

No reporters arrive that day. The story doesn't make the papers... or the 11 o'clock news. It is as if it never happened.

That night, Sabina makes a point of double-checking every lock in the house. Uncomprehending of the reasoning behind her paranoia, Kai laughs at her seeming overabundance of caution.

Sabina gets angry at Kai's gross lack of empathy. "Things like this don't happen to me every day," she begins. "A nine year old... BABY, got his head blown off with a fucking shotgun less than ten feet away from us, and we didn't hear ANYTHING. So yeah, I'm a little paranoid, and I don't appreciate you laughing at me."

Kai stumbles over his own emotions at that point. It is not as if he feels nothing, he tells her... it's just that he deals with things differently.

So he tells her. In reality, the fullness of everything just hasn't hit him yet. He hasn't ALLOWED it to hit him yet. His laughter is nothing more than the nervous cracks starting in his carefully sealed Armor...

Twelve hours later, the reporters start coming. Circling the parking lot like vultures after carrion, they set up their skeletal transmitting towers and serpentine cables. With artificial interest and plastic-wrapped concern, they begin questioning everyone they can find about "the terrible tragedy". It is Sabina's first real encounter with this side of the news media... and each new reporter that arrives makes her hate them all the more. After three interviews with these most guileless of all humans, she begins wishing they would all go away.

Brent's sister pulls into the parking lot... and carefully arranges her hair in the rearview mirror before stepping out of her car and granting an interview. Kai and Sabina look on in disgust.

The swarm of reporters becomes a hive, centered only yards away from Kai and Sabina's apartment. After several long hours of enduring the buzzing of these flies, the 5 o'clock news finally begins.

The television shows an establishing shot of their apartment building, and a picture of Brent from last year's school yearbook. The cardboard field reporter drones on about the details of the death, and cuts to an interview with Brent's parents... tearfully missing "their little boy, who we can never replace..." hair and makeup immaculately arranged for the interview, naturally.

Even Sabina's interview makes the news, the quote being: "It's just a tragedy that children were exposed to this kind of environment, where loaded guns are just lying around... I mean, there are kids running in and out of there all the time!"

Thirty seconds later, the story ends. The reporters outside, having picked the story clean for all the meat it was worth, quickly hover away to their next gritty meal...

And that is all. A two minute news segment. A shotgun, retrieved from the dumpster, and put into states' evidence. Kyle, found watching cartoons in the living room when the police arrived, is subjected to no punishment due to his youth. But he will live with the images he has seared into his mind for the rest of his life.

That night, over dinner, reality finally cracks Kai's resolve... and he nearly doubles over when the reality hits him. For him, death has always been a thing far removed... a relative pronounced dead over the phone, an old classmate killed by a drunk driver and given his own brief two minutes of posthumous fame, a sadly familiar name in the obituaries of the Thursday paper. Never before has it been so near to him. He spends the next day in a state of depression, then finally returns to more pressing problems.

Two weeks later, Uncle Jim and his eighteen year old wife move out of their apartment. To this day, no one else has moved in. The tainted mattress sat in the dumpster for two days, mute testament to a life ended much too early, through the carelessness of a child, the lack of common sense of an Aunt, and the ignorance of an Uncle.

Kai looks at his own Beretta, carefully hidden away in a place only he knows. But no matter how carefully hidden...

Kai unloads his gun, and hides it again. Then he hides the bullets. Then he locks his doors. And he vows that the same thing will never happen to a child in any house he lives in.





But not all people are as careful as I am...