You’ve never killed anyone before. It’s not something you’ve ever seriously considered. So you’ve never really thought about the kind of thing that stops one human being killing another. Shouldn’t there be some kind of dramatic music when that happens? A screaming, crying girl, a police officer with sweat curling down his temple, shouldn’t there be last “I love you”s, bullet proof vests, fire and shattered glass? But its not like you’ve thought about it much.
Turns out what stops one person yanking his gun out of the back of his jeans and crushing the trigger with his oily fingers, what it really, honest-to-God depends on, is the set of a jaw, a pair of eyebrows, a drooping lip and further drooping eyes.
You’d never wanted to kill anyone until a couple of days ago. Mary-Alice told you over the laminate, burnished slate with silver flecks, came to visit you in your new flat, congratulations to you and your fiancée. The laminate was new, dustless and just installed with the state-of-the-art kitchen, and her fingers picked at it when she spoke that one sentence that morphed you. Makes sense that one simple expression would stop you in your tracks when only seven words had set you down them in the first place. She said them with red eyes and damp cheeks, she flicked her index finger on the inside of her wrist, the same gesture you used to make when you were young and nervous and afraid.
Flick.
Flick.
“He did it to me too, Jack.”
Flick.
Texas was a long way away but when you got off the plane home was even further. There was something disgusting in how easy it was to buy a gun, and something delicious in the fact that the man who would be killed by it was the very one who’d got you your license, back when you hated guns and wore that Frankie t-shirt to school.
You could practically buy it in the airport. How long before they asked if you wanted it gift-wrapped? And how long before they asked if you wanted fries with that? “I’ll have a magnum forty-five with extra cheese and make it supersize”. You can’t believe you used to live here.
You hired a car, its not nice but still gets a few stares from the locals ; owners of failing rust-buckets. It seems like the town has died since you left. When you were a kid it was growing, unfolding as you discovered more and more, you were Columbus. Then it staled, you finally got out, moved to the big apple. The city was fresh and ripe, teeming with life, as the town you left behind began to decompose. You are so glad you no longer live here.
The house is old and familiar when you arrive, but rubbed around the edges, not as Fisher-Price and gleaming as you remember it. You are still furious, even more so now, as glimpses of your sister’s scared face sweep across your mind. Your bedroom is the top right window, and you remember the weak screech of the curtains being drawn in the middle of the afternoon and your breath fluttering in the dark. That was a long time ago. You jam the gun down the back of your jeans and kick the car door shut. Mary-Alice’s red eyes jump to the forefront of your mind again.
Going up the drive you catch the ghost of cigar fug and the echoe of his stinking fumbling fingers comes screaming back. The smell makes your stomach jolt, a long buried fear. You fight it though, you are not a kid anymore. You are strong, not vulnerable. You decide to begin with his face. Change the landscape of it, mirror the way yours did. An eye for an eye.
The door isn’t locked, you go straight in, and again everything smells of childhood and dreams. You shove the door open to the living room, this blind red version of you seems incongruous and unrecognizable amongst the chintz and flowered wallpaper.
Your mother is kneeling by your father’s favourite armchair, in the same old apron, but she is different. Your father is sitting in the chair that always had his imprint on it, even when he wasn’t sitting there, as though some invisible copy sat in his place, guarding.
For a second everything looks as you remember, then you notice the sad forkful of food poised in your mother’s hand, and small out of place things that you want to bash back into the shape of your memory; the photo album on his lap, filled and far fuller and tidier than it had ever been when you lived here; the food on the table was in a plastic tray, the horrible microwave sludge she would have spat on rather than eat back when she had cooked the most fantastic food; the pure shot whiteness of her hair and the odd vacant slackness of his features. Somehow, though his face hadn’t physically altered the skin hangs on him in a listless way and the hard browed man you knew is lost in this sad face.
Your mother, oblivious to your rather violent entrance a second ago melts from shock to joy as she asks the reason for your abrupt visit, while your father remains still. She never knew. She never knew, and now she never will, you decide.
You almost convince yourself he is frozen in fear, waiting for an attack that had been twenty years in anticipation, but its not long before you lose this, and your anger, when you realize that man is gone.
And when you sit over tea and your mother takes him to the bathroom, his figure shuffling in slippers while guided by her hands, you feel something is lost, though you are not quite sure what it is, and the gun metal is stiff against your back.
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