From the classroom’s open doorway, we are looking at the frightened teacher, who is looking back at us—at camera. The woman with the gun stands in profile to us and the doorway; she is facing the children with her pistol pointed at (almost touching) the teacher’s temple. “If I pull the trigger, the kids’ faces are gonna be spattered with your blood—from the exit wound,” the gun-toting woman tells the teacher.

There is another angle, on the kids’ faces, when Henrietta shouts: “Stop! Stop singing!” Seeing that the teacher is afraid has made the children afraid, too; they stop singing.

Cut back to the angle from the doorway, on the teacher looking at camera, and on the woman with the gun—her face is still in profile to us, when something changes in the teacher’s eyes. The teacher sees something, and the woman with the gun turns to face us—to look where the teacher is looking. In the silent classroom, the pop and the hole between the gun-toting woman’s eyes are instantaneous; because the woman with the gun has turned her head, her body is spun sideways by the force of the bullet, her gun slips from her slack fingers, and her knees splay apart as she falls. She lies facedown, her hair and the back of her head already sodden with blood, which is now pooling around her face on the floor.

From the doorway, it takes the kindergarten man two single-leg lunges to enter the foreground of the frame and the classroom, where he squats beside the body of the dead woman. “It’s been five minutes—I’m back,” he tells her. For good measure, the kindergarten man speaks in the preternaturally high voice we last heard when he said he had to go to the boys’ room.

There’s a quick close-up of the much-abused globe on the teacher’s desk; it is spattered with blood from the exit wound. The kindergarten man’s voice-over is lower—he speaks in his more resonant, more grown-up voice. We hear the adult kindergarten man say: “It’s been a tough day for the world—for this world, anyway.” (Deadpan noir doesn’t worry about overkill.)

When the camera pulls back, we see that Paul Goode is saying this to the shaken teacher, who has been spattered with a little blood; after all, she was standing at the periphery of the exit wound. With a white handkerchief, Paul Goode removes a spot of blood from the teacher’s cheek. The two bloodstains on her white blouse, on one shoulder and one breast, are not removable with the handkerchief, which Paul Goode puts in his pocket. Where to put his gun is more awkward. The long barrel of the silencer makes the gun appear bigger than it is—too big for the kindergarten man to put in the pocket of his shorts, and to stick it under the waistband of his shorts would look ridiculous or dangerous. To take the gun and the silencer apart might make the children anxious. “Give that thing to me,” the teacher tells him, putting the weapon on her desk, beside the bloodied world.