The Wall

Finally they built it. They did.

It was a long, wide slab of metal that didn't keep much of anything out, except for those that didn't like monuments that screamed injustice; those last diehards of fake freedom, afraid they wouldn't survive admitting they were wrong.

Thousands of names were engraved into the metal slab that was made of melted down semi-automatics. Each name boasted that it would soon turn eighteen, but never did. A few were older, their teachers and attendants, tucked in between all of those youths frozen in time, yearning to look after them and teach them, but now that was all over. They had been silenced by the silencers, and instead their power lay in memory and below ground, where an impenetrable vault held the nation's remaining semi-automatics, except for whatever the military kept to fight foreign wars; but even soldiers cried when they looked at those weapons these days. The people had submitted them one by one in a solemn procession that had gone on for weeks, as the stoic broken parents of those thousands of names waited and watched.

When that wound of the nation was closed and the Wall was erected over it, the people finally knew what to call the scourge they had endured. It was state-sponsored terrorism. Dirty money that sacrificed twenty-four children every day. Evil becomes weak when exposed, and so it was that these monolithic forces washed away in a flood of tears. 

That Wall became a beautiful thing, glistening in the dim sun there on the White House lawn.

In memory of the twenty-four who will die today.