Lockdown at the School for the Deaf

Yesterday, my son taught me the sign for lockdown— 
different than locking a door,
or the shutdown we invented at the start 
of the pandemic. Little fistfuls of locks 
swept quickly between us, a sign 
designed especially for school. 
 

My son spent his first years a different kind of 
locked up—an orphanage in Bangkok, where he didn’t 
speak and they couldn’t sign. He came home, age four, 
silent. We thought being here could open 
doors. It has, of course. He’s learned so much 
at the deaf school; the speech therapist calls it a Language 
Explosion. I keep lists of the words he’s gathered: 
vanilla, buckle, castle, stay. And 
lockdown. He absorbs it like the rest. Now the schools 
he builds with Magna-Tiles have lockdowns. I worry 
in trying to give him keys, we’ve only changed the locks.  
 

To lock down a deaf school, we use a special strobe. 
When it flashes, we flip switches and sign through 
darkness. The children know to stay 
beneath the windows. Every five minutes a robot texts: 
“Shelter in place is still in effect. Please await further 
instructions.” Then we pull the fire alarm, a tactical move to 
unsettle the shooter. Hearing people can’t 
think with noise like that. A piercing thing 
we don’t detect, to cover the sounds we make, the sounds 
we don’t know we’re making.