The sound of a lockdown is much like a firetruck. A firetruck with a focused, robotic voice crunching through the loudspeaker after each deafening siren. Are there earthquake sirens, in California, which we were watching fall into the ocean in DVD-quality? My teacher was struggling to turn off the movie projected onto the whiteboard. My teacher was struggling, and looking at me, who had set up the projector for her. Me, huddling like an earthquake beneath the counter beneath the windows with a pair of scissors in my hands and my classmates pressed around me. She was small and round and her daughter was in the next classroom over painting a paper mâché oyster all glamorous and wet with varnish and I gave my scissors to my best friend and went to help her. She locked the door and covered the windows and I stood on her desk to turn the projector off at the source. Reaching up, aware of the fact of my classmates staring at me, aware of the screeching siren, of the playground across the street, of height and the light off the snow coming between the blinds and my blue scissors and my best friend who I lie to more than anyone.

There were two bomb threats at the school where my brother was student teaching. They are funny stories but they arrest my mind after I hear them, tell them. They are stupid stories, sick—misspelled dry-erase death-wishes on mirrors in bathrooms I always imagine look like the bathroom near the cafeteria in my elementary school, always one stall off-limits and I never knew why. After them, I sit in the empty kitchen like a jar of fresh bacon grease, slowly congealing in the false-memory hijacking of a life without my brother.

I step down from the desk and I am responsible for her, when there is a gunshot and when something crashes against our classroom door. She has long yellow nails and her skin is so much clearer than mine and she smiles with teeth when she is angry. (And I know she thinks I’m ugly and gross because of the way she talks about people like me and the way she doesn’t thank me when I do anything nice for her anymore, but I will still eat twelve cold lobsters at her graduation party and her boyfriend will still abuse her, so I try to think of her as small pleasures, as a loud voice calling me weird names down the hallways, as plucking my fingers through her knotted blonde hair during homeroom.)

And when the boy in camo and shooting glasses breaks through the classroom door, I take a bullet for her and die. It might be a love confession. But I still die. Over and over, taking the scissors from her hands and tucking into the disquiet beneath that long chipboard countertop, waiting for a memory of a death that may or may not come, that has and will come.

EA Kane (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist living in rural New England. Their work has been published in the Black Warrior Review, the Sandy River Review, and A Possible Practice, among others. In prose, verse, and visuals, monsters rule their heart. Website