The blue cots in my kindergarten class appeared while we ate lunch each day. For me a thermos of milk and a bologna sandwich. How I thought the lid to my Dr. Seuss lunch box was a tray, and I was supposed to keep all the pieces of my lunch safe on the metal surface. Scott Palmer was assigned to the cot next to me, and he whispered all through rest time, blotting out the sound of the records Mrs. Edwards played. I learned he shot himself outside a bar in our hometown a few years after I graduated from college.
My dad took me hunting and put a loaded shotgun in my hands before turning up the path in the woods where he believed the pheasants waited. Acorns dropped from trees, and he turned often to put a finger to his lips because my boots made too much noise in the crinkled leaves. I knew I could never shoot a pheasant. And I worried every step I might accidentally shoot him if I fell over a root or rock I couldn’t see.
In middle school Cody moved to town and came to my house after school most days. All the girls loved the soft swing of his California hair, the wave it made when he tossed his head. Sitting up on the washer in our laundry room one day, he picked up the 22 my dad kept in the corner to shoot at the crows in our corn patch. I told him to put it down. He laughed, pointed it under his chin. His body hit the floor before the shot stopped ringing in my ears.
A few years before he died, my dad started to carry a mini pistol strapped to his belt like a key chain. A child’s toy, a ghost gun, something plastic and terrifying. He’s going to shoot himself in the foot my sister said. I don’t want it in my house I said back. It slept beneath his pillow for intruders when my parents stayed in their camper on South Padre Island. I asked him to leave when he showed it to my son.
On the computer screen I see weapons, black, insectile, rows of square images selling safety, fire power, death. This is not a video game. This is not a movie. The websites offer credit, my son says he’s afraid of guns, but Papa has them, he wants to know. He cannot understand, tells me I’m overreacting when I scream at him and throw his computer down the stairs.
Beth Konkoski is a writer and high school English teacher living in Virginia with her husband and two mostly grown kids. Her fiction has been published in journals such as: Smokelong Quarterly, Story, Split Lip Magazine, and The Baltimore Review. Her collection of short and flash fiction, A Drawn & Papered Heart, won the 2023 Acacia Prize for Short Fiction and was published by Kallisto Gaia Press in June 2024. (https://www.kallistogaiapress.org/product/a-drawn-papered-heart/).