Taking Aim by Michael Cart

Author:Michael Cart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-07-15T16:00:00+00:00

LOVE PACKS HEAT

Eric Shanower

THE DRAGON

Francesca Lia Block

When they told me about the new law—that every teacher had to get the training and carry a weapon in order to teach elementary school—I thought they were insane. But then isn’t the whole world in 2022? It was the strangest thing. The idea of learning to use a gun when all I wanted was to read stories about little animals to kindergartners as they sat in a circle looking up at me with wonder brightening their eyes. Clap hands and dance with them. Fill the room with colorful letters and numbers, a cozy corner for the children to snuggle in, on a beanbag chair under a paper rainbow. Some of them cried sometimes and I wiped their noses and put bandages on their skinned knees. Once we had a petting zoo in the playground. There was even one of those nearly extinct llamas with long eyelashes but he was a bit ornery so we could only look at him. On birthdays we had parades, blew bubbles, decorated cookies, and sang songs. Once there came a man who played guitar. He reminded me of Jordan with the brown of his eyes and the fullness of his mouth, and one of the little girls, Mimi, noticed I was crying at that old song “Puff, the Magic Dragon” and came over and patted at my nose with a tissue.

“Don’t cry, Miss Adams, your makeup will get all runny.” Her eyes loomed large behind her purple sparkling glasses, and her braids were like antennae, picking up every emotion in a room. “Are you crying because Jackie Paper came no more?”

I was crying because Jordan would come no more. Jordan is my weakness and also my great strength. I believe he saved my life.

The day it happened seemed like any day, except for the snake man. We had free-play and story time and lessons and recess. And then Terry, the young man with the reptiles, came to show them to the children. They sat in their circle around him and he took lizards out of cages for them to touch, only on the back, tentatively with one extended finger. I was worried about bites and germs, and hovered with hand wipes. Some of the lizards had been abused, Terry said in his soft voice. He had rescued them. People had starved them, burned them with cigarettes, slashed at them with knives. “Because they could.” Those are the words he used. Terry then took a long, thick snake from its cage and draped it in my arms. I hid my involuntary shudders and smiled. The snake’s skin had the cold, opaque whiteness of congealed milk.

While I was holding it, the young man, Terry, turned back around from slipping a lizard into its cage and pulled out his .44 Magnum. I stared down that big black dragon’s maw of death.

My weapon was locked in the closet. This was a violation and I could lose my job if it was found out, but I refused to have a loaded weapon on my person while teaching babies.

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