When Jamie was buried, camera crews lined up like mourners themselves. I stood in the back row, watching his mother collapse for the second time that day, and all I could think about was the cold grip of Marcus's gun in my palm three days earlier.
I've never told anyone this, not even muttered it to a priest during my weekly confessions. I still carry the remorse of what happened. Not guilt exactly, I believe I didn't do anything wrong. But I didn't make the right decision either.
Jamie's house sat halfway between school and mine. I'd stop by almost daily, drawn less by Jamie than by his older brother Marcus's Kawasaki motorcycle. We'd straddle that machine like cowboys, Jamie knowing which wires to touch to make the engine growl, but only when Marcus was out. If he caught us, we'd earn matching bruises.
“Worth it,” Jamie would mutter afterward, beaming through teeth too big for his narrow face. He had a gap between his front teeth that whistled when he laughed too hard. The sound used to annoy me, but now I'd give anything to hear it again.
Danny would watch us from the kitchen window. He was always watching like any regular seven-year-old with eyes that seemed to catalog everything: the way Jamie hot-wired the bike, the way we tucked our shirts in afterward to hide the evidence, the way we'd high-five when Marcus's car disappeared around the corner. I'd wave at him sometimes, but he'd just stare back, his small face pressed against the glass like he was trying to memorize us.
“Your brother's weird,” I told Jamie once about Danny.
“He's just quiet,” Jamie said, but there was something defensive in his voice. “Mom says he's sensitive. Picks up on things.”
I didn't understand what that meant then. Now I think about it constantly, what Danny picked up on, what he learned from watching us play at being dangerous.
Marcus kept doves in a makeshift loft above the kitchen extension. Jamie and I would climb up there, and sometimes Danny would follow, three rungs behind, never quite catching up. He'd sit in the corner while we tossed feed, his skinny legs pulled to his chest, watching the birds with an intensity that made me uncomfortable.
“Feed them too much, and they'll get lazy,” Marcus would shout from below. “Lazy birds can't fly.”
Danny whispered something once while we were up there, so quiet I almost missed it.
“What?” I asked.
“They're trapped,” he said, louder this time. His voice had a rasp to it, like he didn't use it enough. “The birds. They could fly away, but they stay.”
Jamie laughed. “They're not trapped, stupid. They're fed and safe.”
But Danny shook his head, and I remember thinking he looked scared of something neither of us could see.
I can still smell that loft, feathers, dust, and something putrid beneath the birdhouse.
Marcus fancied himself a musician. He'd play guitar and belt out songs about American rebels, his voice surprisingly generous for someone so rough-edged. Between songs, he'd lecture us about the troubles, stories that sounded nothing like our history books, stories more abrupt, bloodier.
Danny would sit on the bottom stair during these sessions, out of sight but close enough to hear. Once, I caught him mouthing the words to one of Marcus's rebel songs. When he realized I'd seen him, his face went red, and he ran upstairs.
“War's coming again,” Marcus would tell us, his eyes fever-bright. “We all have our parts to play.”
My mother said Marcus had “ideas,” which was her subtle way of saying he wasn't right in the head. Jamie called him a patriot. I thought they were both nuts, but kept quiet. I was more interested in the doves and the motorcycle than their politics.
But Danny, Danny seemed to drink it all in. I remember him once at the kitchen table, drawing soldiers with red crayons. Not stick figures like most kids. Detailed ones, with guns raised and mouths open in silent screams.
“That's dark, buddy,” I said, trying to sound casual.
He looked up at me with those too-vigilant eyes. “Marcus says soldiers are heroes.”
“Come bro,” Jamie called that Tuesday. “I want to show you something.”
We'd been revving the motorcycle, confident in Marcus's absence. Jamie led me upstairs to Marcus's bedroom, a place normally off-limits. The room smelled of cigarettes and cologne, band posters taped haphazardly to the walls. A flag hung above the bed, not the American one, but one I recognized from history class.
“Look under the pillow,” he said.
The gun was heavier than I expected, cold steel warming under my fingers. It wasn't a toy, I'd held enough plastic replicas to know the difference. This one had weight, consequence, identity.
“Marcus says he needs it for protection,” Jamie explained, voice hushed but excited. “He's with the gang now. If the other side finds out, they'll come for him.”
Jamie demonstrated how to remove the magazine and reinsert it. We pointed it at each other, whispering mock threats, playing soldiers like Marcus's songs taught us.
“Take that, bang, you're dead.”
We never pulled the trigger. We weren't stupid.
I don't know how long Danny stood in the doorway. When I finally noticed him, he was frozen there, his mouth slightly open, his eyes fixed on the gun in my hand. Our eyes met for a second, and I saw something in his face I should have recognized. Not fear, but fascination.
“Danny,” Jamie hissed. “Get out of here.”
But Danny didn't move. He kept staring at the gun, and I realized with a sinking feeling that this wasn't the first time he'd watched us break rules. This was just the most shocking to him.
“You can't tell,” I said, trying to sound stern but feeling suddenly, terribly young. “Promise you won't tell.”
Danny nodded slowly, but he didn't leave. He took one step into the room, then another.
“Can I hold it?” His voice was barely audible.
“No,” Jamie said. “You're too little. Go away.”
Something flashed across Danny's face like hurt, maybe, or anger. He turned and ran, his footsteps thundering down the stairs like gunshots.
“He won't tell,” Jamie said, but he sounded less certain than before.
I put the gun back under the pillow, and we left Marcus's room. My hands were shaking. I went home early that day, and I didn't stop by the next morning before school.
Jamie wasn't in school that Wednesday. By second period, we were all in the assembly hall, and I knew before anyone said anything. I just knew.
Marcus had left before dawn. Jamie and Danny woke up early, before their parents. Their father heard Danny's voice first, a childish imitation of our previous day.
“Take that, bang, you're dead.”
Then came the real bang.
I didn't cry at the funeral. Couldn't. My mind kept replaying that moment in the doorway, Danny's face, the way he'd looked at the gun, the way I'd sent him away without understanding what he'd learned from watching us.
When they arrested Marcus for illegal firearm possession, he called Jamie the “first casualty in America's modern struggle for liberation.” As if his brother's death was a political statement rather than a senseless tragedy.
Danny hasn't spoken since. Not one word in three years.
I visit him at the facility every other Saturday. His parents stopped coming after they divorced; his mother couldn't bear it, and his father couldn't forgive himself for not paying closer attention.
I kept going, driven by something that wasn’t quite guilt but lives right next to it.
He sits by the window in the common room, always in the same spot, drawing pictures of birds and trees. His hands are bigger now, no longer a little kid's hands, but he still draws with the same intensity he had when he watched us.
I bring colored pencils and paper. Last week, he drew something new, a crude but recognizable motorcycle. The therapist called it progress. I called it a knife to the heart.
“Hey, Danny,” I say every visit, pulling up a chair beside him. “It's me.”
He never looks up, but once, just once, his pencil paused mid-stroke when I said Jamie's name. His hand trembled for a second before continuing.
I tell him things I never told anyone else. About how I dream of that gun's weight in my palm. How Jamie's whistle-laugh still echoes in my head at random moments. I wonder if Danny remembers me playing casually with Jamie, or if he only remembers me holding the gun, playing at death like it was nothing.
“I should have told someone,” I said last week. “About the gun. About Marcus. I should have made Jamie put it back and never touch it again.”
Danny's pencil kept moving across the paper, a bird this time, wings spread like it was trying to escape the page.
“I should have talked to you that day,” I continued. “Really talked to you. Asked you what you were thinking. Made sure you understood it wasn't a game.”
The pencil stopped. For a long moment, Danny sat there, staring at his drawing. Then, so slowly I almost missed it, he reached for a red crayon and colored in the bird's breast. Bright red, like blood, like a warning, like all the things we should have avoided.
“They say you might never speak again,” I told him. “The doctors think the trauma killed something inside of you.”
But I wonder sometimes if it's the trauma that’s keeping him silent. Maybe it's his choice or a tribute. Maybe Danny learned what words can do, how they can turn jokes into tragedies, how “bang, you're dead” can become real, how seven-year-old boys can become villains.
I visit for Jamie, who will never grow older than twelve. For Marcus, whose choices destroyed his family with his “ideas.” For Danny's parents, who couldn't bear the shame of what their youngest son did.
But mostly, I visit for Danny, I visit because someone should remember him as he was: innocent, curious, and scared, trying to understand a world that made no sense, following in the footsteps of boys who didn't know they were leading him astray.
And I visit because in those rare moments when his pencil pauses and his hand trembles, I think maybe he would tell me something. Maybe he would say what I couldn’t quite bring myself to say: that we were all trapped, just like those birds, fed on vices and principles in equal measure, never quite learning how to be free.
Christian Emecheta is a Nigerian writer and self-awareness advocate. A two-time shortlisted nominee for the Nigerian Students Poetry Prize and a recipient of the BAOBAB Award (2019), he was also shortlisted for the Joe Ushie Literature Foundation Award in 2026 and is an Obsidian Foundation Fellow (2025). He served as a volunteer editor for the Poets In Nigeria @10 Anthology (2025).
His fiction and poetry have been featured in numerous publications, including Arts Lounge Magazine, Step Away Magazine, The Decolonial Passage, PSYCHOPOMP, Nalubaale Review, The Shallow Tales Review, After Dinner Conversation Magazine, Pure Slush, Balagan Magazine, New Feathers Anthology, Exquisite Death Ezine, Micromance Magazine, Humourme Magazine, SHINE Magazine, Flame Tree Publishing, Cranked Anvil Press, Walden's Poetry and Reviews, and Mocking Owl Roost, Superpresent Magazine, 9th Chinua Achebe Poetry/Essay Anthology (2024), Brussels Review, Rattle Magazine, and the Gauteng City Region Observatory (GCRO), Palm Branch Publishing, to name a few. Christian finds inspiration through reading, film, and the boundless landscapes of his imagination.