Stephanie Halldorson

Okay, you know the drill. Once upon a temporal-spatial determination there lived so-and-so who was such-and-such and did this-and-that much to the dismay of a group of misunderstood and therefore wicked somebodies.

Some wear white, some wear, hmmm, black perhaps. They slip into place and black pawn moves white pawn and the game continues. How we got here isn’t important. What is important is the next move, the final move, the standing face-to-face without blinking move. This pawn and that.

If it were my choice, a knight in shining armour would come from afar – deus ex machina – to relate that tried-but-true separated-at-birth-story. But it’s not my choice, it’s your choice (admit it), and the pen drifts across the page. The ink is black, the pen itself is black and the words scrawl what you want: a tiny, black gun.

A tiny black gun appears. You laugh, and a bigger black gun appears claiming superiority but knowing that the safety latch is unreliable and almost all of the bullets have been used to shoot squirrels in the back lots after school.

Face-to-face, unblinking, gun-to-gun. You know the image. Who is the hero? Who gets to win? Don’t know yet? Well, then, a task is set, a hero task. The task will decide the true hero. Gun-to-gun and the test is someone watching (like you are watching), someone watching who cracks a walnut, drops a camera, clears a throat or maybe just raises the corners of two lips into an eager smile. Both guns fire. Only one bullet emerges from its cylinder and quickly lodges itself into the back of some kid’s neck far, far away. The second gun explodes due to malfunction. There is no blood in fairytales.

So, now you know the hero. (Hint: the hero is the only one left at the end of the story.)

Wait, this isn’t the end of the story.

The RCMP arrive in their red jackets and square shoulders. (The ambulance arrival is in a completely different tale.) A female officer arrests the one person who is still standing.  Unlawful possession of a firearm. He is exposed, weeps into his handcuffs, promises (cross my heart) to never do it again. No one can hear him, because the crowd has all gone to a wedding, the one between Joe and Amy (or is it Angelique and Sebastian?) on channel 5 at 10 pm, repeated tomorrow at 9.

So now you know the hero. This is the end of the story. (This is the story you asked me to write.) Only the true hero is left at the end. And this is the end. You know the moral, people: guns don’t kill.