Two shells and a cold steel barrel
Shout out to all the kids of the world who ever wanted to secretly kill their dad and the sheer grit they mustered to refrain
Marlboro Red Soft Pack.
The smell of cheaply ground tobacco on his trigger finger.
I didn’t have to open my eyes to see the barrel pointed at my head. A little boy who slept in fear with a loaded shotgun over his bed knows what cold blue steel smells like.
I kept the .20 gauge pump Mossberg loaded with a round of buckshot to slow him down and backed it with a hollow point deer slug to finish the deed, if needed. Never kept more than two rounds in it. I hated deer hunting and they never knew.
It was my shotgun he was holding in his hands; bought for me as a birthday gift. I never asked for the damn thing but quickly figured out why soon enough. I would be the executioner for every stray, sick, mangey, rabid, or lifeless dog that was brought out in the country to die. I was chosen by my father to do the work. We didn’t tolerate suffering animals in that house.
All those years. All that time thinking he was angry at me for something. Being born. Reminding him of his mortality. Chewing too loudly. Asking for too much. Asking too many questions. All the things a son contemplates before unknowingly passing the anger (generational trauma) along to his own children one day.
Why was this dude provoking me while I held my eyes closed. He just stood there. Never pulled the trigger.
All this time and it was the provoking that finally fell into place for me last night. He KNEW I would get angry enough one day to finish the job. To put the animal out of its misery.
He just stood there. Waiting for his anger, passed down to me, to rise up and take him out. He couldn’t do it himself, so he asked me to do it. In the only language he knew how to speak: untethered rage.
I turned 49 last month. He never made it beyond 43. Heart attack knocked him dead as dirt and I smiled as I threw a pack of Marlboro Reds in his casket. To this day I love the smell of loose tobacco on a freshly opened soft pack. And I don’t smoke.
Perhaps the most bizarre and fascinating tenet of his silent provocation wasn’t that he knew I was pretending to sleep as he stood there towering over my twin bed, begging me to find the grit to take him out. To make his suffering go away.
The cosmic and very fascinating bitch of it all is that he somehow knew I would.
Stringer