CW: Gun violence, child death, child endangerment.

THE GUN

You know the one about the Gun. The Gun goes where it wants to. On Thursday morning just after recess, the Gun will walk through the front doors of Thurman Elementary, and it won’t sign in at the front office or wear a visitor’s badge.

The Gun does most of its damage in the first five minutes. The Gun doesn’t care about lockdown drills, and it will not wait for the SWAT team to arrive. The Gun can chew through a door, a desk, a cinderblock wall, and kids don’t wear those bulletproof backpacks during reading time.

Everyone has a right to a gun. Nothing can take that away from you. What you lack is a right to the lives of your children.

The Gun likes a game of hide-and-seek. The Gun will rove the grounds until someone stops it. The Gun has been here many times before.

The Gun is not working alone.

THE SHOOTER

He is never anyone special. Just a man exercising his right to a gun.

THE TEACHER

Michelle Dalton has taught fourth grade for nine years, long enough to know how the job yawns wider each year, collecting all the loose threads that society needs done but no one wants to pay for. Michelle has six figures in student loans and makes less than $50,000 a year. She shares a rental house with two roommates and has a weekend job at Trek & Field selling athletic shoes to make ends meet. She does not get paid overtime, and the school district does not buy the art supplies. She is not entitled to bathroom breaks or a nonworking lunch, and she doesn’t get paid for summers.

Michelle wears the armor of an elementary school teacher: an A-line dress in an ocean print, a blue cardigan to match. She bears no weapon but a sharp-edged teacher’s tongue that cuts through noise like scissors.

Every teacher in Thurman Elementary will sense the Gun moments before it opens fire as a tense, drawn-out pause, an upset child drawing the breath to scream. They will not visibly panic, not with twenty-one pairs of eyes locked upon them for guidance. Michelle’s body will act before her mind comprehends the threat.

It is Michelle’s job to keep her students safe, just as it is her job to take the blame for whatever harm the Gun inflicts in the process.

THE PORTAL

You know about the Portal too, although not by that name. The Portal seeks the places where children hide. It stalked the air raid shelters in London during the Blitz. It lurked in underground cellars during the Cold War, crouched between the canned corn and rancid Crisco. It has fed itself in Italian orphanages and Australian residential schools, and it has only gotten hungrier.

The Portal has been exhibiting itself at gun shows recently, a gleaming bullet-proof vault in which to store kids when the shooter comes. The Portal has been installed in every classroom, funded by bake sales and cereal box tops, bought at the expense of pencils and math books and a music teacher.

The Portal is not wheelchair-accessible. The Portal is a failure of policy. The Portal was dressed up like a castle for Halloween. The Portal is not a reading nook.

There is nothing more necessary than the Portal. The Portal will keep the right children safe.

Whatever the Gun doesn’t claim will get packed into the Portal like coats at the Lost and Found. The school has a ritual for it, a special alarm. The children, sensing something wrong in the pop-pop-pop coming from the gym, will obey uncomplainingly when Michelle shoos them in. Michelle will enter last, pulling the door shut behind them.

The Portal is dark and humid inside. There are no windows or lights to attract attention. It is the gap beneath the bed where the monsters hunt. The Portal’s breath presses in around them, hot and stinking, as it swallows them down, down, down.

Time doesn’t stop inside the Portal. It telescopes. The children strain their ears, listening for the classroom door. The popping sounds are approaching now. Pop and it passes the fourth grade art wall, pop-pop-pop at the water fountain, pop beside the mural of Rosa Parks, pop-pop and it has reached Ms. Dalton’s door. The siren continues its wail. Someone is sobbing in the dark. Someone has to pee. Someone refused to hug his mom goodbye at dropoff today, and might never get the chance again.

When the Portal door opens, the Gun will be waiting.

But the children will not be in their classroom anymore.

THE MOUSE

Not like the mice that infest Thurman Elementary over the winter break. Not the wild ones that chew through the corners of the fun-size cracker bags, leaving cellophane confetti in the snack bin. Not like the class mouse, tame in her cage with soft white fur and blood-red eyes, who holds out her little paws to accept a sandwich crust.

This mouse has a gun: a copper blunderbuss with the end belled out like something out of Looney Tunes. His name is Sir Miles, and he has been hunting. He grooms the blood from between his claws like sticky jam as he considers the newcomers, a teacher and her eight students lined up like chessboard pawns.

It is his move.

He is quite large for a mouse, nearly knee-high. He makes a sweeping bow with his tricorn hat as he introduces himself. His accent is a lilting brogue. He has perfect manners and rides a Shetland pony. His charm, too, is a weapon, subtle and efficient, as he makes a plea that sounds a little too rehearsed, a flimflam man working over his newest marks.

He demands the things men with guns always demand. He asks for someone else to fight his wars. His people rely on a steady supply of children from the World Beyond who are kindhearted or brave or foolish enough to take up the magic crowns and wield the spells to make Sir Miles’s enemies dead. He is very persuasive. His eyes shine with tears, and he clasps his little paws as he pleads his case. The children, dazed in this strange new world, tear-streaked and shaken after the Portal’s darkness, are mesmerized.

Mice are crepuscular, creatures of shadow and hidden intentions. They creep from their dens at sunset and feed all night long. They are averse to bright lights. Mice eat their own feces but lack the ability to vomit.

Sir Miles is full of shit. But he means business.

THE NEGOTIATION

Michelle also means business.

She isn’t fooled by this Narnia shit, the soft black eyes or the twee little jacket. She doesn’t trust a mouse with a gun. Anyone in possession of a gun has made a plan to use it.

But Dylan needs to pee, and Katie R. and Katie V. are sharing a coat in the drizzle, and it’s almost time for lunch and they’ll all need to eat. The kids are already eyeing the mouse like they’d like nothing better than to bury their faces in his warm, soft fur, and it’s only getting worse as he unspools his sob story, his oil-drop eyes large with crocodile tears. If Michelle doesn’t take charge, she’ll lose control entirely.

“I’m sorry for your troubles, but we’re not getting involved in your war,” she says sharply, cutting off the mouse mid-sales pitch. The rain is steadily increasing its barrage, snapping against the shale like fireworks. “Is there somewhere we can go to wait out the storm?”

The mouse, steel-eyed, mounts his Shetland pony, settling in front of the corpse of the furred thing he just killed. He gives Michelle an unambiguous look of hate, like he has just spotted a particularly odious vermin. “Follow along,” he says, and that predatory look submerges beneath his charm. “Castle Rowland is just beyond the rise.”

Sir Miles keeps up a steady patter, dangling his problems like a pair of keys before a grabby toddler. Michelle knows his type, men who force you into a shared predicament to short circuit what your uneasy gut is screaming.

What did he kill just before they arrived, and why did he use his hands when he had a gun?

Michelle doesn’t take her eyes off that gun as they follow the path behind the mouse. Everything in this world pierces. The dreary pines stab up at the gray sky, and the rain tattoos through her knit cardigan. She makes the children pair up and hold hands like they’re making a bathroom trip.

Blood runs down the pony’s hind leg, leaving sticky, dark hoofprints.

Michelle does not look back at the Portal. She keeps her eyes on the gun.

CASTLE ROWLAND

Every mouse on the parapets is armed.

The castle’s walls are tall and pockmarked, and not one green thing grows in its courtyards. The mice have lined up gunnysacks for target practice. The volleys of gunfire blend with the pattering rain.

The idea of a castle is to protect the things you love by walling them in and daring your enemies to take them. A castle, like a school, is a locked-up box for precious things. Because of this property, castles were once the sites of war, and their names evoked the bloodshed. Scarborough, Dover, Prudhoe, Kenilworth.

In the distant future, castles will cease to be a symbol of war when governments find more civilized ways to regulate what one person can take from another. Children will enter castles with delight when they have never learned to fear them.

Children will learn to fear their schools, though. The names will come to stand for another kind of warfare, the sites of battles waged and lost without the benefit of soldiers or a moat. Columbine, Sandy Hook, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Robb.

THE POND

Castle Rowland also has a pond, long and low, graveled around its edges with strange ivory pebbles, jagged as teeth. The water shimmers in the rain as though it has swallowed down the sun.

The children want to get a better look, but Sir Miles hurries them along.

OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN

Only eight came through the Portal. They are Li and Dylan and Nathan and Katie R. and Katie V. and Nevaeh and Caleb and Angelo. Most of them are nine years old, except for Katie V., who turned ten in September.

The other thirteen kids in Michelle’s class—the lucky ones—yes, call them that—are still hiding in that dark closet, listening to the slamming doors, the pleading sobs of teachers, the shrieks of first-graders trapped in the bathroom, and then pop-pop-pop—the chalk-white silence left in the Gun’s wake.

THE FEAST

The grand hall is smoky and low, and a roast much too big to be poultry turns on the spit. Portraits loom over the long refectory tables, paintings of human children, regal in velvet and bone-white crowns, their mouths turned down, somber and thoughtful.

Servant-mice in pale blue smocks scurry down the table rows and ply the children with delicacies. Katie V. gets a whole cake to herself, and Nathan eats lemon sorbet from a silver dish. It has been a very long walk, and they are too ravenous to resist. Even Michelle accepts a bowl of soup, though she dislikes the way that the mice seem prepared for their surprise guests. Like it was scheduled weeks ago, and everyone has rehearsed their roles.

As the mice shoo the humans from the table, they file past the roast. A feline skull leers back at Michelle, the clawed, furry paws still attached to the leg-bones.

THE PORTRAITS

None of the children in the portraits seem to make it past their teenage years. When Michelle asks Sir Miles about this, his whiskers twitch into a needle-toothed grin. “The magic of the crowns isn’t for adults. Only children can wield them.”

When she asks what happens when the children grow up, the mouse just laughs her off. “We send them home, naturally,” he booms. “What else would we do? Eat them?”

AN INTERLUDE

Michelle cannot sleep that night. The eight sleeping children sigh and hum around the room—the girls tucked into the grand four-poster bed, the boys burritoed in blankets on the rug before the crackling fireplace, and Michelle against the door to watch for intruders.

Castle Rowland feels more real than what happened to them at the school today. The alarm sounding, the pop-pop-pop in the hallway, the sobbing in the dark.

At that moment, instead of her family, Michelle had found herself thinking of her weekend job. How they had no protocol at Trek & Field for what to do if someone opened fire.

This strange castle, with its mice and portraits and ivory pond, has a logic stronger than the laws of reality. All her life, Michelle had thought she knew what she would do if the Gun came to her school, but the Gun doesn’t care about the stories people tell themselves in their own heads.

A NOTE ABOUT SCHOOL SAFETY

We will not try to prevent the Gun. The Gun will accept no limitations. But we will try very hard not to offend the Gun. If you offend the Gun, it may decide to get personal.

Better to develop rituals against the Gun, to train the kids to block the door, hide in the closet, play dead on the rainbow carpet where they do calendar time and sing the morning song. Better to invest in metal detectors. Better to ring the playground with barbed wire, to hire off-duty police instead of another counselor.

You can have a special alarm for the Gun. You can make the teachers draw the blinds, lock the doors, take the long route every day to recess in the name of safety.

It doesn’t matter if any of it works. The important thing is to have something to blame besides the Gun. Best to treat the Gun as a force of nature, rare as an earthquake, a freak tornado. Best to accept the Gun. It belongs here. It belongs everywhere. The Gun will always be with us.

If you try hard enough, maybe you can convince the Gun to shoot someone else’s kid instead.

THE TOUR

“Perhaps the children would enjoy a tour of Castle Rowland,” Sir Miles suggests at breakfast. “Unless you would prefer that I return you to your Portal?”

It is a threat, and Michelle knows it. This world exists in a moment suspended in time, the instant between breaths, with the Gun on the other side of the classroom door.

Nothing could be more dangerous than returning home, not even these predatory mice with their blunderbusses and their feud with the neighboring kingdom.

But then Sir Miles shows them the armory.

THE ARMORY

Gun racks hold row after row of blunderbusses, flintlocks, swords, and crossbows, sharp as a buckthorn thicket in winter. The children race through the rows of oiled metal, spitting out the gunpowder tang in their mouths and noses, until they find the eight glass cases at the back.

In each case rests a chalk-white crown. Their delicacy fascinates Michelle, like anatomical drawings of bird skeletons. The glass casing lifts off easily. When she picks up a crown, it has a soft texture like soapstone, only lighter. It is constructed from many fragments fitted together and polished smooth, except for some top bits that jut up, raw as broken teeth.

Angelo has taken a crown into his hands. His eyes slingshot between Sir Miles and Michelle, seeking their permission. “Can I, Ms. Dalton?”

“Go on,” Sir Miles encourages him. “Give it a try.”

“Angelo, wait—!” Michelle begins, fear gripping her voice so it squeaks.

But Angelo has already donned the crown. It fits like it was made for him. He stands a little taller, acclimating to the kingliness settling upon his shoulders.

“It’s true!” Angelo shouts, his brown eyes bright and happy. “It’s really magic! I can feel it!” He lifts his hands, and to Michelle’s horror, a dozen swords rise up from their racks like a cloud of startled pigeons.

POWERS

Every teacher knows the moment when they lose control of their classroom, and it usually begins with exuberance. Once, on a Friday before a long weekend, Katie V.’s dad brought in birthday cupcakes, half chocolate and half vanilla. It was raining, and nobody had been out for recess, and everyone wanted vanilla but there weren’t enough to go around. Then Katie V. started crying because she didn’t get the kind she wanted on her birthday, and Dylan squashed the unwanted cupcake on the floor, and then full-on chaos broke out, the kind that could only be stopped by flickering the light switch and making threats to cancel the afternoon movie.

The crowns are like those cupcakes. Every child grabs one despite Michelle’s attempts to stop them, and then there are a series of close calls when the swords and guns go clattering through the air, nearly beheading Caleb, who decides to retaliate. They call down fire and shadow. They scorch the stone walls black. Nevaeh freezes the air, pulling snow down inside the armory, and the other children run around catching snowflakes on their tongues.

Finally Sir Miles leads the children out to the courtyard, and Michelle follows behind, defeated and impotent, her voice hoarse, her right temple throbbing in the telltale sign of a migraine.

Michelle doesn’t blame them. She understands the source of their joy. Children rarely get to feel so powerful. Children spend their days being told what to do and where to go. They don’t get to decide how they dress or what they eat. They aren’t allowed to get angry or to dislike anyone, and if an aunt or grandpa wants a hug, the child will have to give it.

Children only hold power in their games, which is why they make up superheroes. They play at telekinesis and pyrokinesis and mind reading. Children use swings to learn to fly, or they use sticks as makeshift wands. But now that power is real.

“That’s enough,” Michelle tells Angelo as he sets a row of gunnysacks on fire. “Let’s go inside and have a break now.”

Gentle Angelo, who always volunteers to collect all the basketballs after recess, who always holds the door as they file out to the buses after school, glares up at Michelle. “You can’t make me,” he says.

He is right.

When some children grow up, they will buy themselves a gun so no one else can ever make them feel small again. They will not try to change how adults make children feel.

THE TRUTH

The refectory tables have been removed from the Great Hall for the occasion. The mice crowd in for the coronation, hundreds of them, packing the castle. Although they only rise to Michelle’s knees, they force her apart from the children through sheer numbers, pushing her out, cutting her off, until she stands alone in the courtyard, the door to the hall slammed in her face.

It is gray and raining. Alone, Michelle wanders the grounds as the guard-mice eye her with open hostility. What do they do when the children grow up? But Michelle is already grown. The mice have no use for her now that they have pried her away from her students.

She finds herself drawn to the glimmering ivory pool and its sunlit glow in the dreary rain. Her shoes crunch on the strange, pointed gravel. The water swarms with koi, and beneath them, mounded like coral, are human skeletons, too many to count, ribcages and skulls and long, slim femurs buried in the finer knobbles of knucklebones and teeth. The fish nibble at bits of connective tissue clinging to the fresher skeletons. Some of the bones are broken, as though sawed open to lick out the marrow.

None of this surprises Michelle. She knew from the moment she held that crown, its soapstone texture, its unusually light weight. The bones of children fused together and polished smooth, a vessel for their collective power once they grew too old to be of other use, handed down to their successors to wield in turn.

The last of Michelle’s hope slips away as she gazes into the pool. Her students’ fate is a tale of two deaths. One at the hands of the mice, who have no love for these children beyond their utility in war. And the other through the Portal where the Gun awaits, rattling the classroom doorknob. Become the weapon, or its victim. Either way, they die.

And if they stay? If they flee? Who will wear those crowns next? Which classroom will the Gun seek out instead?

Someone will have to die. There is no one coming to help her. No one will stop the mice, the shooter, the cycle that returns them to this point, this pond, these children’s bodies and their wordless accusation.

Teachers have always been left alone, dancing around the Gun, the Portal, the crowns of bone, trying to keep other people’s children safe with donated art supplies and cardboard tubes saved up for Craft Day.

One thing is certain: Michelle will never tell her students about the bones. No child deserves to know how little the world regards them.

But there are other weapons she can give her students. Truths as powerful as any magic crown.

AGENCY

Into the Great Hall, then. Into the castle, where the mice are piping military tunes on ivory flutes as Sir Miles gives a speech. Michelle plunges into the thick of the cheering mice, forcing a path, though they scratch and tear at her legs and rip her dress to tatters. All those blunderbusses tip down and track her, the bells of deadly trumpets, as she approaches the dais, the eight little thrones, the children unrecognizably regal in rich, furred cloaks sewn from the dappled hides of calico cats.

“Wait,” Michelle cries out in her sharp teacher’s voice, projecting over the din. “Wait a moment. I have something to say.”

Sir Miles stabs a clawed finger at Michelle, harpooning her with accusations. “See, your Majesties? Even now, she plots to depose you, to deprive you of your crowns. Strike her down with your power, or else give the command, and our soldiers will ensure she never troubles your reign again.”

All eight faces turn to consider Michelle, frowning in displeasure. But she is no longer afraid. Unlike the mice, she loves these children. She bears the kind of love for them you can only have for children not your own, children freely given into your care day after day in the trust that you will return them back again, imperceptibly older, until eventually they become old enough to live on their own.

And from that place, Michelle speaks to her students like she always has, giving them the knowledge of their own power and the strength to use it.

“Those crowns belong to you,” she tells her students. “Sir Miles is right about that. I won’t ask you to give them back. But you have a choice now. You can fight for the mice in their war if you want. Or we could go back home and help your friends. The choice is yours. Whatever you choose, I will help you.”

Sir Miles laughs, and the other mice echo him, certain in their victory. They have been plying these children with gifts and sweets and flattery, and don’t believe dowdy, buttoned-up Michelle can offer anything equally tempting. The children have been growing irritable during her speech, their faces pinched and unhappy. Li stands up. Nevaeh twitches her cloak aside to bare her hands.

“I know you’ll make the right choice,” Michelle tells them. “Whatever you do, Ms. Dalton loves you.”

Michelle stares into the gun barrels trained upon her. Nathan glowers down at the crowd. Katie R. has flushed the deep red that foretells a tantrum, and Nevaeh raises her hands. Michelle closes her eyes, giving herself to their judgment.

All eight children begin to scream.

And the sun answers.

BRIGHT LIGHTS

The sun sheds her gray robes and steps down into the Great Hall.

The heat is incredible. The blunderbusses bloom like daffodils and drop their seeds in molten pools of brass. All the shadows burn away. In the courtyard, the bone-pool hisses and steams as it boils off.

Mice cannot tolerate bright lights, nor can anything that has made a habit of feeding on children. The air is hazy with the char of singed fur.

Michelle should be charred too, but the eight children run to her and throw their arms around her waist, just like when the dismissal bell rings and they don’t want to say goodbye.

HOW IT ENDS

There is no happy ending when the Gun visits a school. Even if it takes no lives, it will rob every child and adult of the bone-thin illusion that bad things only happen to other people’s children, those who prepared less, prevented less, who failed to hire enough cops or install enough bulletproof glass, who didn’t run the backpacks through the metal detectors, people who deserved it somehow, who left a door propped open or a fence unrepaired. They will go to bed that night numb inside, neither scared nor angry, because it feels like slipping through a portal to a world where your hometown has become the legal hunting ground of angry men, and no one thought to warn you. Later, they will feel guilt and intense shame, like they should have done something differently, like they should have known the rules had changed that day and prepared accordingly, like they forgot their jacket when everyone knew it would rain.

The truth is that the Portal has been growing, fed by the Gun meal by meal, and it will swallow and swallow until every school lies in its belly slowly digesting in a glimmering pool of children’s bones, until someone decides to stop it.

Michelle plunges through the Portal, the children lined up behind her like they’re off to art class instead of facing their deaths. The Portal door bursts open upon the classroom at Thurman Elementary just as the doorknob turns, Michelle at the forefront and eight kids in crowns behind her, confronting the Gun with the bones of children, the bitter magic only children have the right to wield, asking the question that answers itself, damning the Gun with their bodies, their flesh, with the sound of children screaming.