The Bodyguard ("History" -- #12)

HISTORY
by Michael Kroetch

The bodyguard is at a Christmas pageant. The chair he’s in is far too small. It’s a child’s desk and he can feel his legs turning into pickles from being pinched up into it so tightly. But the bodyguard makes no noise. He doesn’t want to disturb the children’s performance. He doesn’t know any of them. Or any of the parents so busy preserving the sacred event for the future with their cameras. No, he’s here alone. And now his gun has started to cause a terrible pain in his groin region—but he doesn’t feel it would be right to pull it out in front of the Baby Jesus. He has a sense of priorities. He knows as well as the Wise Men not to create a scene. He was a child once himself and was instructed on how to behave properly. For the good of the group, you must keep yourself silent. Ignore pain.

He leans forward to listen to the children. They are so cute in their costumes as they struggle through their lines amid the flashing cameras. They have no idea that each flash could be a bullet. But the bodyguard does. He knows it from his training. He knows how fast an event as enjoyable as this can suddenly be transformed forever into something too dark to remember.

He turns his head. All around him the parents are smiling, aiming cameras, and clicking down their fingers again and again... This is when something inside him snaps: When he leaps into history. Leaps up with the tiny desk still attached to his pickled legs. Leaps in front of everyone—waves his arms and whips out his gun to protect the scene of the birth.