In This Lifetime, Our Kids Survive

The kid looks at me and makes a toy gun out of his fingers and directs it into the ground to break the soil. He notices my alarmed face and wonders what I’m remembering and I say everything before handing him a seed to plant in the hole he just created. The kid nods and continues to shoot into the ground with his small fingers that don’t realise they’re making like weapons because they are so far removed from that reality. In this world I am the closest he gets to violence and most of it lives in my memory these days.

He asks me to tell him about my mom and I say she was a third grade teacher who would have taken a bullet for her children if a gun made its way into her classroom. He asks me what a bullet is so I hand him another seed.