I Looked Down At My Hands...

• Emily Sherry, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2013

I look down at my hands; they are still cold and shaking. My shirt has been pulled out from my trousers, my tie loosened and my top button undone. My breath still swift and brisk from what had just happened. The people around me looked just as shocked, their eyes scared and sad. I see two people coming out of the shopping centre doors, wearing a dark green uniform with ‘paramedics’ across the side of their sleeve. They were holding a stretcher, covered with a large white sheet. They are followed by a women screaming, her husband trying to grab a hold of her as she wailed, tears streaming down her face. I couldn’t look any longer. As I turn away, I catch the eyes of a man staring at me. They were cold and angry. I had seen him once before, right before it happened. He was with his wife and son in the shopping centre. They were not with him now. My mind drifts back to when it happened.
The boy is 19, quite tall, with dark brown eyes. They were angry, yet distant, his fists clenched around the barrel of the gun. It all happened so fast, people were screaming and ducking for cover. Parents shielding their children from his aim. They were terrified. He was yelling, angry at something that wasn’t there. The police came in, screaming to put it down, he swung around and pointed it straight at them, and their weapons on him. His anger he had had when he turned around, had had become sadness, loneliness, tears welling up in his eyes. He put it down, and fell to the ground. Helpless, motionless he crouched on the ground, his head in his hands. The police grabbed him from the slightly stained white tiles of the shopping centre floor. I hear a child softly crying from behind me, being separated from his mother during the ordeal. He was scared and shaking, what had just happened has sunk in.
I was pulled from my thoughts by a woman in a dark brown pencil skirt with a mint blue dress shirt, her eyes peering over from her glasses. She said, “Could you please see the officer now?” As I stood up, I could see people watching my every move, I will always remember their faces. When I got into the room with the police officer, the boy was there.
No one will ever know what was going on in his head in the moments before he started it all. Who was to blame? Him, me? This is when I looked at him and said, “Come on son, the officer will take you now.”