Gun Safety
Like A Girl
Growing up, I was the only girl on both sides of the family. Most of the time, it didn’t seem to matter much. I followed my brothers and cousins when they went outside to shoot the BB gun in our grandparents’ backyard in small town Wisconsin. We took turns aiming for the red cherries on the 7-Up cans lined up on the cement birdbath. Flat on our bellies like little green army men, we steadied the gun on a log snagged from the woodpile. In front of us lay the neighbor’s cornfield. Behind us, the house, where Grandma watched from the upstairs window, afternoon sunlight glinting off her glasses.
Check the safety. Fix the cherry in the notch on the sight. Exhale, keep your hands steady. Don’t pull, squeeze.
A good shot would flip the can into the air, rip petals in the aluminum, and leave a BB rattling inside the remains.
When I was eight, I liked the way holding a gun made me feel. The weight. The faint smell of grease. The glow of self-reliance. On my turns, I hit the can often enough to imagine myself a markswoman. I felt like Annie Oakley. Or Princess Leia, grabbing a laser blaster and declaring, “Somebody has to save our skins! Into the garbage chute, flyboy.”
Once, my youngest brother turned away from the target and accidentally pointed the BB gun at me. I froze, the tip of the gun wavering a few feet from my chest. I knew I should step aside or duck, but I couldn’t make my body move.
“Hey, watch it!” our cousin yelled, voice pitching toward panic, as he grabbed the barrel and twisted the tip out toward the cornfield.
Innocence
One Christmas when I was a teenager, my dad and I were walking in the woods behind my aunt’s house in northeast Ohio. Our boots crunched through the thin shell of ice coating the muddy, leaf-dappled ground. Above the bare branches, the clouds felt stiff and heavy, like it was about to snow. We had not walked far when a man wearing a black and red checkered flannel coat approached, shotgun slung over his shoulder, wary dog trailing behind.
“What are you doing on my land?” The man gripped the butt of the gun, the skin on his knuckles taut and white. I don’t remember exactly what my dad said, only that he spoke slowly and apologetically, hands open and outstretched in front of his body. I think he explained we were visiting and didn’t know the boundaries.
“I just need to protect my land,” the man repeated again and again, as if he were afraid. But why would he be afraid of us? My eyes flicked between the gun and the dog’s yellow stare. Dad grabbed my hand, the way he used to when I was little and we were crossing a busy street. We turned to leave, retracing our cracked footsteps.
We never walked in those woods again.
An Email from the Principal of the Elementary School Where I Work
If gunfire were to take place and we are all on the bus lane, staff should immediately load students onto the closest bus and have students duck down in their seats. Staff should also get on the buses. Parent pick up should shut the doors and any students still in the building should stay in the building. If you are out at recess and this occurs and you are not close to the building all students need to drop to the ground. If you are on blacktop or cement get off of that and onto the grass. Bullets ricochet off of cement.
My Grandparents’ House, Christmas 2019
Code Red
Door locked, lights off, we crouch in the back corner of the classroom, behind the cupboard of math games and the wobbly plastic table. The other teacher and I place our bodies between the kids and the door. At best, it’s a nominal gesture. Between a bullet and a child, my body is just a few more seconds.
After ten seconds, first graders start squirming. Restless legs thump against the sticky dust-colored linoleum. We sit packed together so closely I can smell Marisol’s shampoo and Journey’s watermelon gum and stale urine from unwashed khaki uniform pants. Fingers muffle giggles. I tap shoulders, squeeze hands, and glare to hush them. A minute passes. Someone sneezes. Then, a pinch. A slap. A squeal. Until Aaron hisses,
“Shut up or they’ll shoot us!”
Even as an adult, I can’t rehearse a lockdown without imagining what it would be like to die surrounded by an alphabet rug and color-coded tables and tiny chairs and walls covered in sight words printed on a rainbow of construction paper and crayon drawings of stick people and hearts. Even in a classroom that feels so distant from my own childhood, sometimes I still catch a faint echo of boots crunching through ice and wind rattling dry corn stalks.
Jasmin tucks herself into the crook of my arm and leans against me. Jeremiah wraps his hands around my ankle and squeezes.
On Accidents
My grandpa once told me about a man whose own dog shot him dead.
The man had a few beers in his duck blind and set his loaded gun on the ground. His dog stepped on it. The bullet hit his heart.
Impossible
“Maya’s not here today,” one of the second-grade teachers says, stepping into the hallway. “She brought a gun to school this morning and will be suspended for a couple days. I thought you should know.”
Maya is in second grade. She just turned eight. She loves pink and princesses. She told me everyone in her family calls her Butter on account of her chubby cheeks. Once, when the tornado siren test went off while we were reading, she was so startled she cried and clung to my hand.
Impossible, I think. No fucking way.
Every day when I pick her up for tutoring, she tells me, “I don’t like to read.” She pauses, watching my face while I feign shock and consternation, until she blurts, “I love it!” She giggles as she skips down the hallway, pink barrettes rattling.
Yesterday, I noticed Maya’s fingers were raw and chapped angry red as she traced the line of each sentence. I imagined her waiting for the bus without mittens in the Minnesota cold. I had meant to bring her a pair today, but I forgot.
“The last kid you’d ever imagine, right?” The teacher shakes her head. “She told me some older kids had been bullying her on the bus and she just wanted to scare them so they would leave her alone. She took the gun out of her big sister’s purse.”
I imagine how Maya must have felt holding that gun. Hands steady against the weight, I whisper to myself, “Somebody has to save our skins.”
Anna Chotlos’s (@achotlos) writing has most recently appeared in Sweet Lit, Hobart, and Complete Sentence. She is a PhD student focusing on creative nonfiction at the University of North Texas.