By Paromita Talukder and Carmen Reinicke

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It’s been 23 years since the school shooting in Columbine, and such events are still happening today. This is a time capsule following students from two different decades during lockdown.

Content warning: Violence, Death

I. 

You’re wiggling your first loose tooth when the bell goes off – anomalous – it’s time. 

1. do what the teacher said 
2. don’t mess it up because this is Important
3. go quietly – with soft cat-paw feet, single file if you can
4. to the corner, there, where she’s pointing 

Squeeze in, hold your breath so everyone can fit, elbows touching your neighbor in the few mismatched squares of shiny linoleum that can’t be seen from the door, an ominous portal, flanked by wide glass windows. A design flaw, now realized. 

No talking/ whispering/ laughing/ coughing
Try not to sneeze, if you can hold it
Just in and out and in. Breathe, while your heart ticks away
In time with the footsteps you can hear trotting down the hall
Making odd music with the clarion call beeping over the loudspeaker
opposite pied piper sending you into the shadows

Lights off, leave your books where they are. Your tiny hands couldn’t carry all of them anyway, even though it might be nice to hear a story while you sit, criss-cross applesauce, knees tense, wedged into place

A boy is fidgeting, rocking and making faces: eyes wide, teeth exposed, hands pull ears
The teacher looks daggers at him, one finger to her lips but no shhhhhhhhhhh
And his eyes close tight to concentrate on still, still, sit still  —

II. 

This morning I woke up smelling metal and tasting pennies —
and not for the first time
we play with the sands 
of time, 
and act out a makeshift lamentation 
of ear splitting cracks and dried vermillion.
I touched my cracked burnt lips  — suddenly piquant,
and traced the raw scrape on my knee,
wondering where 
a cavity 
would look best.

The kid next to me wrestles with her crinkling bags of
chips  — I think I spot a cheese puff in the doritos bag  —
and snaps her gum (snap, crackle, pop)
as she studies for the next class’s test. 

Laughter echoes down the halls, seeping through locked doors,
like a roadmap.
A delicious aroma shepherding wolves to the herd  — a collective state, a homeland.

We lay an inch under the dirt as pine trees relinquish their piercing cones  —
This short arrow lodged in us
because the shaft broke before we could pull it out  —
A deliberate
protruding
curvilinear
arrangement,
of a scaly diaphragm, the scabrous amnion that screams
at any little blockage (“I’m coming through”), an overestimation.
It doesn’t take much to scratch the soft, flushed, faces of children,
kicking each other for some room, giggling through each other’s dreams,
marking the territory for their improvised beds,
under a layer of pine cones and the sticky stench of false despair  —

I. 

On the playground whispers start and spread, snippets overheard from the nightly news in the background during family dinner, the car radio on the way to school, a glimpse of a headline in the newspaper unfolded – an early introduction to the horror of muder-suicide 

I heard, 
one girl got shot in the chest nine times but she lived, it didn’t kill her just bang bang bang and still breathing blood everywhere 

I heard,
one girl said she believed in god and died, her classmate hid behind her baby blanket and lived

I heard, 
one boy made a list. They found it on a computer in the lab and it had all the names of the people he’d shoot and one girl saw her best friend was on the list and cried all day.

III. 

Next time: nervous  — conditioned
Each time the shrill bell sounds its piercing call your heart deadens, 
stops vibrating out of place quite as much as it used to and you plod, 
soft, a tired herd, to the corner.
Or the back of the room, 
or the side wall that can’t be seen from the window or, 
once, in home economics class, 
to the laundry room – the smell of cheap detergent floating around you as
you sardine sit and wait, feeling more and more like fish trapped in a tin 

You stop asking if this is the last time  — the last of this strange, silent dance  —
and start to feel like a zombie, limbs moving slowly with external motivation.
No thoughts or prayers, just a mission you didn’t choose.

Process

Paromita and Carmen discussed recent threats of violence and incidents at Paromita’s high school, and Carmen recalled her early years in grade school before lockdowns became a regular part of life for students. They wanted to illustrate the feeling of school lockdowns, from the very first one, to how students today are still grappling with the immediate threat of gun violence.