The Shooter's Story: Fiction About Hansel

1

Here’s some background for those who don’t know. I was kidnapped by the guy that shot up my school. He made me shoot up another school with him. Forced me at gunpoint. Then he shot me anyway.

Now I’m in jail for life.

For my death too I will be in jail; this is Texas and I’m on death row.

I ruminate a lot because there’s not an awful lot to do except wash your clothes in your sink or toilet, shout back and forth to other inmates, sleep or write.

I need to get some things off my chest before I’m executed, so writing it is.

2

I wasn’t a bad kid, but I was interesting. I dissected dead birds (they were already dead when I found them). But I gave them proper funerals afterwards. I put laxatives in my teacher’s coffee once, but that was because he didn’t let any student go to the bathroom in the middle of his class and I wanted to give him a dose of his own medicine, so to speak. I stole fifty dollars from my mom’s purse, but that was so that I could feed the homeless kids that lived at the shelter and came to school with nothing for lunch. I played sick to skip church, but that was because the minister was molesting little kids there and nobody believed my friend Roy Sabin (who for the record was an upstanding-citizen goody-goody type) when he told on the minister, so why would they believe me, the troublemaker?

I put clothes on the dog, but that was because he was cold. I stole my mom’s morning-after pills, but that was because my girlfriend was unexpectedly raped and needed them. I deflated Mr. Randolph’s tires, but that was to get him to stay home because he always drove drunk.

3

The shooting happened on a Tuesday. I was lucky and unlucky to be in the bathroom at the time. The shooter barged in and ordered me to carry his bag of guns and ammo for him. He would have shot me if I’d refused. He then shot all my friends.

I felt like a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz, those people who for a few weeks more of life were made to trick their fellow Jews into the gas chambers, then burn their bodies. I saw the movie, The Grey Zone.

I had no idea whether he’d kill me anyway in the end, but he shot all my friends in front of me, as one of them begged me for his life and the other told me I’d get the death penalty if I even lived at all. Well, what do you know, he was a shrewder prophet than me.

4

I have a penpal now; her name is Anne-Marie and she’s at the Mountain View Unit in Texas serving a life sentence. But she’s going to be out on parole soon. She knows a whole bunch of anti-death-penalty people from all over the world because her case was high profile. Maybe she can help me.