Houston Southard

The Muffin Man

Three doors down, negotiators can’t gain an inch. Desperate sobs from the shooter’s mother have the small effect her sobs always do. In the doorway, the boy keeps the barrel of the gun in his mouth, his finger off the trigger, but warns, albeit through some drool, not for long.

Breeze blowing up my bathrobe, McMuffin in hand, I look around and see I’m the one who has to keep this kid from an easy out, and I do it like so:

From behind the police tape I tell the boy about a girl in Maroga. Her parents were tech giants and she was abducted for the payoff. This wasn’t a heist film. The parents couldn’t wire a million bitcoin to an offshore account just like that. It was months and months, but the girl had diabetes so the ransomers had to keep her breathing.

You wouldn’t believe it, I say to the boy who just 86ed ten of his peers. The kidnappers weaned her off sweets. They followed her insulin schedule and had her run ladders and made her meditate.

When finally funds transferred and the girl was returned, physicians looked her over. The diabetes had gone into remission. Between bites of McMuffin I yell what the physicians concluded: Capture was the miracle she could never have hoped for.

As I say how in celebration, the parents got her a three-tiered red velvet cake and a virtual reality console, I notice this isn’t much of a suicide prevention tale, but as a red bead blinks over his eyes, I shout through cupped hands with the hope a realization will occur to the boy, a realization that came to the girl in Maroga: Others don't always have to choose what's best for us.