The Children -- One Day

THE CHILDREN--ONE DAY

THE KIDS were not particularly precocious; they were just sitting in the shallow water of the wading pool in the backyard of their house--rather, the backyard of their parents' house--in the middle of a beautiful summer day. The sun was gorgeous, hot; the yard was gorgeous, green; the lawn was freshly mowed, short; and the smell of summer penetrated the youngsters' nostrils. The lilacs had already bloomed, but the air was filled with the life of children in a backyard playing in a wading pool in the middle of summer.
They sat in the pool with squirt guns, but they were not squirting each other as one might suspect. Instead, they held the little pistols in their hands with the little plug in the back of the gun open, their hands busy filling the chamber with dirt and mud and grass that they had dug up from the lawn that was becoming more beautiful with each tear in the turf. The faces of the children were concentrated, focused on their work. And when they were through--that is, when the plastic toy squirt guns were filled to the max--they got up and took the guns, one by one, over to the trash bins in the driveway--because they knew enough to pick up after themselves and not to litter.
The older kids found their guns--the cap guns, the battery-operated guns, the real-life look-alike guns--in the toy boxes in their bedrooms, or out in the garage where they had left them, or out in the backyard where they had forgotten they had left them. But after they had found the guns, they gathered them together in the driveway and made fun of them. They mocked the guns, they laughed at them, they spit on them. One child, whose name is not as important as the act he performed, took one of the toy rifles by the muzzle and slammed it down hard against the pavement until it broke into two pieces. Some other children followed his example, while others took the smaller toys--the pistols--and kicked them and threw them down and took rocks to them. And when they were done, they too took the toys and deposited them into the trash cans.
And then there were the older kids, the oldest kids--the teenagers, who were almost not kids at all anymore. In the afternoon, they walked through the neighborhood and into each of their parents' homes--one after another--and broke open the gun cabinets. And they were prepared; well prepared; very well prepared: they brought in from all the garages the hammers and saws and needle-nose pliers and other useful tools. And then they took the guns down and out of the cabinets and began smashing them with the hammers, sawing them in half with the saws, breaking them into many tiny pieces--so many fragmented pieces that the weapons could never--ever--function again as weapons. It took a long time to complete the task, but finally they were done, and instead of throwing the former guns into the trash cans, where they belonged with the other junk, they just left them there on the kitchen table for their parents to see and to do with as they wished.
And then the kids jimmied open the drawers below the remains of the gun cabinet (which had been destroyed during the ceremony) where the ammunition was stored. But before they concluded their responsibilities, they went outside and summoned the younger children--the sisters and brothers and neighbors--from the backyard and the wading pool and the driveway--and invited them to come in and help: to take turns flushing all the bullets down the toilet.