(after Hanif Abdurraqib)

I remember guns were a private thing we only used at camp beginning with the potshots my cousins and I took at empty Miller Lite cans the white cans with the red emblem and the time David yelled at me after I discharged the lever action BB gun across the water because I didn’t know the pellet could skip all that way and hit someone and I remember the smart satisfying crack of the pump action .22 rifle with little recoil and while it was thrilling it was safe and it was us and even when I shot the bolt action .30-06 with its painful kick in the shoulder and the breathtaking stopping power the hunters would speak of radiated in my body there was still comfort and even with the deafening blast of the break action shotgun and when I bruised my clavicle sighting in Uncle Tom’s muzzleloader for deer season and when older now and a little drunk we shot .45s next to the shed where we skinned and quartered the animals with the red pines swaying overhead and my arm bucking and trembling with the kinetic crackling murderous thing I swear it felt safe but when I was 18 in that public parking lot in Mike’s teal Ford Escort with the aftermarket soundsystem Christ did my guts ripple with panic when he opened the glovebox and pulled out a bluegray 9mm and I remember he was angry with some other boy who was flirting with his girlfriend at her job and how his cryptic request for help became a stone of dread in my stomach and now I remember again the absurdity of how this kid in his American Eagle cargo pants this boy who was only 16 who had charmed my notoriously overprotective parents into letting me ride around with him in his shitbox turquoise car had thrust us into this reckoning because maybe I had misunderstood all his jokes about his family’s mafia connections on his mother’s side and I remember I convinced him to leave the fucking thing in the glovebox and I remember sweating alone in that car with the gray upholstered seats praying as he walked armed only with ego and some fuzz masquerading as a goatee into the store where she worked and when he came back and said the boy wasn’t there we never spoke about it again even though we stay in touch and I was at his wedding last week and now our children play together because those bullets stayed in the clip unchambered and there was some part of the gun that was orange I swear but if you ask me to name his girlfriend or the store or the strip mall I don’t remember.

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Jeremy T. Wattles is currently writing poetry, creative nonfiction, and possibly a memoir. He has also appeared in Nine Mile and Textualities. He lives in Upstate New York.

Artwork by Shelley Lennox Whitehead