I Swear I'll Make It Up to You by Mishka Shubaly

made at Simon’s Rock, I’d fantasized about violence on my own. Tashina is First Nation, descended from the Cree Tribe on the Big River Reserve in Saskatchewan. The mascot at our high school, Sanborn Regional High, was the Indian. Our school was too poor to field afootball team, but the windbreakers of our soccer and field hockey teams were emblazoned with the grim face of a cartoon Indian in a stereotypical Lakota Sioux eagle-feather warbonnet.
    Even at thirteen, I had understood that Indian Festival, our fall spirit rally of war whooping and face painting and toy tomahawks, was disrespectful white trash bullshit. By my sophomore year, I had alienated enough classmates that Indian Festival became the backdrop for a colorful fantasy.
    I conjured a scenario in which I had been put in charge of our class’s float for the parade. The final day of Indian Festival, the float was revealed to hold only a small teepee, out of which emerged Tashina, in the traditional war dress of her people. She muttered an ancient incantation, a song to “free the blood” that slowly and painfully burst the veins of all the kids in my high school. I, of course, would be spared, and I had envisioned the two of us gleefully bathing in the blood of our dying classmates.
    It’s not just that I could or should have stopped Wayne or should have died. I had basically willed the shooting to happen. My mother had wept over me when she picked me up. Galen’s parents must have gone insane with grief. How could I have been so stupid, so selfish, so horrible? I was as guilty of Galen’s and Nacunan’s murders as Wayne Lo. I wanted to tell my mom, to confess my sins, to get that sickening knowledge out of my heart, but I couldn’t yet speak. It was okay—we had time. Tomorrow I would be able to talk. I would tell her, and she would listen.
    Each winter, my mother wrote a Christmas letter to her sixteen brothers and sisters and all her faraway friends, updating them on the events of the year and wishing them happy holidays. That night, still not having slept, I noticed my mother’s annual family Christmas letter printed out on the pine dining room table my father had built. I picked it up and, walking into the living room, began to read it.
    My father had been working out in Vancouver since the spring. It had been our understanding that we would be joining him there.In the letter, my mother revealed that she and my father were getting a divorce.
    I could not breathe. I fell to the floor. Now the tears came, so hard and so fast that I felt like I was drowning.

    The next night, I pulled on my hat and coat and stepped out into the winter night. I exhaled a big, steamy breath and watched it swirl in the moonlight for a second before it disappeared. I felt the best I had since the shooting, the best I’d felt in a long time. I didn’t yet feel relief, as such, but anticipation of relief, like I’d finally got an appointment to have the dentist pull a rotten tooth that had been causing me pain for years. I started walking.
    I hiked the couple of miles out to the stone bridge that arched over the railway tracks on the way to the rope swing, the highest point within walking distance. I climbed up on the low retaining wall. It wasn’t that far to the train tracks below. I’d have to go down head first in order to actually die and not just fuck myself up.
    It was curiously cosmic when you thought about it. It took twenty-four hours for the world to spin on its axis, and it had taken twenty-four hours for my world to turn on its head. I waited for the sound of a car approaching, which would be my cue to jump. Just one quick, brave swan dive to end my life. I closed my eyes. In my mind, I could see Chuong, flying off the end of the rope swing, floating through the air, and then disappearing forever.
    No car came. I waited. Still, no car.
    I looked down into the darkness and saw nothing.
    My father was a