The Day After
by Brian Reich
Adelphi University
Brian Reich is an English major on the Creative Writing track at Adelphi University. After his planned graduation in 2026, Brian plans to get a Masters of Art in Education and become a Highschool English teacher. Brian enjoys writing fiction and flash fiction, and is the current president of Adelphi's Creative Writing Club. He hopes to continue improving his craft while sharing his love for reading and writing with others.
The school is empty, silence blaring through the loudspeakers: the absence, its own morning announcement for the day ahead. The disruptive stillness blasts through hollowed-out halls, knocking on each classroom door, searching in each tiny crevice for a sign of life. It calls on the wind to disrupt the lockers, smashing into them in the hope of opening their doors and examining what was hurriedly left behind.
A bird cries outside: maybe a crow, maybe a raven, probably a pigeon. The noise easily saunters through the open window of classroom 112, a ray of sunlight forming a red carpet for the sound to trample on. The bird’s wail comes into contact with the deafening silence. The cry shreds apart the quiet as it barrels its way forward, bouncing down the darkened hallways, its eagle eyes scouring the new environment, looking to invade the silence’s former kingdom.
It soars through the area, finally coming to something different, a door shattered into fragments of splintered wood and glass. Inside the room, the cry finds a turned-over desk, deep circular holes separating the wood. If it looked closer, it would find the holes are too deep to be done by a pencil or pen. it would notice the black soot and metal still lodged inside between the metal frame and the wooden platform. As it is merely the cry of a bird, it simply moves on.
In the corner of the room is a dried puddle of tears, the salty water leaving no trace compared to the darker, sticky puddles littered near the turned over desk and windows. The tears were from thirteen-year-old Hailey Fleece, a young girl currently sitting in her bedroom with the lights off. She is silent as she shakes, her body shifting and vibrating involuntarily. In the coming days and months, she will struggle to enjoy her favorite detective shows, as an onslaught of medical personnel label her in the hopes that the correct word will fix the terror from which she can’t escape. Her dream of becoming a teacher, shattered, as the idea of entering a classroom leads to her mountains of medicines failing, her eyes glossing over as memory and the present lose separation.
As quickly as it entered, the cry of the bird exits the classroom, zooming past the shattered glass that a security guard used to sit behind. A triangular piece clings onto the window frame, attempting to not fall to the desk below. The glass is weak though, and will drop by the end of the day, a gust of wind doing the fragment in. When the people in charge return and look upon the scene, they will not question how the glass broke, they will not state that they are surprised it happened. Those in charge will only murmur that if only it was next year, that next year's budget would have had money to upgrade the glass with something stronger, something that a steel tipped shoe could not shatter like a spider web. As they say it, they all know the words are lies. The glass was never going to be replaced. The money would never be put aside in the budget. It is simply a lie they say to feel better. The same lie they said when they pushed the upgrade off this year, the year before that, and the year before that.
The cry follows the path taken by hundreds of students, each one trampling over each other, their movements mimicking that of deer, their minds focused on how far they are from reaching beyond the brick walls of the school. In the center of the hallway is a lonely, filthy, crumpled shoe. It is missing its partner, the other shoe of the pair having been taken out of the school by its owner, Ben Smith. The one that remains slipped off Ben’s foot as he scrambled to exit the school. The shoe’s body is flattened, stepped on and over by a myriad of others as the rush to the front door continued on. Ben did not notice it missing until he returned home hours after losing it. When he told his parents, his tone was empty and cold. The words were smothered by a tight hug.
The bird’s cry at last finds its final resting place, the largest room in the building. The cry bounces across shattered porcelain walls and lunch tables still covered in cold food and garbage. It explores the surroundings thoroughly and slowly dissipates, leaving the silence to once again spread. The cry’s final moments are spent bouncing off of brass shells ejected from their metal home.
Tomorrow morning, police will show up to examine the school one final time. The officers and detectives will hide grimaces as they piece together what happened. By then, outside of the local news and the families affected, the event will have been forgotten, just another tally on a list too large to fit on a single sheet of paper. Arguments will break out over who could have known, who could have prevented it. The school will be blamed, the police will be blamed, videogames will be blamed, even the victims will be blamed. The one who should be blamed is out of reach for those who are hurting. A collective agreement is made that the other culprit, the one found at each of these similar incidents, must be danced around. Some of the students will grow up and refuse to play the game and dance around that fact. They will be harassed and silenced, called attention seekers for not agreeing to the rules they are supposed to follow.
All of that though, that’s for the days to come. For today, the incident still makes its way onto national news, a smattering of politicians still speak on the tragedy of those lost, and the social media accounts of the one responsible are examined to make sense of what happened. Yesterday was a tragedy, in the days to come it will be forgotten about like all the ones that came before, but right now it is remembered, right now it haunts the school like a ghost, a ghost left behind on the day after.