Gun Shop

Yellow caution tape fence. Work at a gun shop. Thinking about the meaning of dreams in the Bible. There was a suicide today. 

I imagine death is like waking up. 

A suicide today right there out on the range. They’re scooping up his brains this minute. Or maybe this hour. Some of the RSOs are having a laugh. We get paid thirteen bucks an hour and good death benefits. I sleepwalk through half my day handing guns off to murderous psychopaths. I can feel this place gnaw my head. I’m always dreaming.

Walked into it, the suicide. Nobody bothered to tell me about the body. All that red piled in a mess right up under me. Rivers of crimson. I’ve been told to mop up the bloody boot prints I’ve trailed behind. I was late. It is cloudy outside. Time does not govern me.

“Wow,” says a man with his wife fingering a gun. “I mean,” he cocks the slide and licks his lips and pulls the trigger flagging me. He’s having something close to an orgasm. “Just wow. What a trigger.” 

His wife rolls her eyes and pushes the gun away so that it’s no longer pointing at me. Looks me in the eyes and flicks those fake lashes.

“Yes. Oh yes. Oh God,” the man says.  

“You can’t take this home today,” I say.

“What?” 

The man’s eyes are caves with no lights. Body peeling away from himself.

“You need proof of residency.”

“Goddammit. This gun is going to be the death of me,” says the man and they leave.

“Look at this,” TJ says hitting his vape. He laughs, eyes on his phone. The video of the suicide from our cameras on the range. Every time the poor soul shoots himself TJ makes a triumphant squeal and plays it again. He switches to other apps and turns to fake-draw his sidearm on me. “I’m gonna know what’s inside you, man.” 

I’m just drifting here. Doing my time. Doing my dreaming until I can brood away the rest of my days. 

 “Fuck these people, man. Fuck this place,” TJ says, looking at what a 50-caliber bullet does to the human head. 

Right there right outside the place the cleanup is happening one of the owners is stressed out. Talking to somebody. They all look the same. 

“What the fuck do I pay them for?” says Owner One.

“Would have dumped rounds in him. Anybody who got in my way. Women and children,” says Owner Two.

“I would kill you. Really kill you. Straight up. I would kill all of you.”

“Sir. I would kill you from a thousand yards aways with a one-pound trigger pull.”

 They both are watching the video of the suicide. The guy manning the desk near them is letting people out on the range now. He carries a gun holstered over his anxiety pills in his pocket. Drinks an energy drink—his third one—and plays with a piece of string. 

Some kind of new breed. Like they have a disease. Very small and very pale and all bug-eyed. Faces that never investigate the sun. Balding and young and demented. Attention is elsewhere and everywhere and no place at all. 

“Brandon,” I say.

“Dude.”

“What’s with the string?”

He ties it in the shape of a noose around his throat. 

“I can’t remember where I live sometimes. It’s getting hard these days.”

“What is?”

Brandon laughs and scrolls through his phone.

“What is?”

“Remembering.”

 I whisper a small prayer to myself. Not in a religious sense. Just seemed to me the new black. Faith, hope, love, I say hell yeah, brother. Seems punk rock to me. If we are connected through stories, how can we not be by prayer and dreams? 

“Almost time to go home.”

“No,” Brandon says. 

“What?”

“I don’t know what to do with myself, man.”

Another gun sale. 

“What’s todays date?” the man asks. 

I tell him.

“Jesus.”

“What.”

“I don’t remember last month happening.”

His license reveals that he is only eight years older than me. This man’s body hangs on him like a coat on a rack. 

Another coworker is muttering to himself a plan. He is a large, bearded, armed man.

“Just kill yourself if you get caught,” he keeps on muttering. He’s looking at pictures of naked girls on his phone and eating pop tarts. “Any day now. Any day.”

They come walking out with the body. 

“Lucky bitch,” the big one is talking to the quiet one. He’s staring down at his phone and looks up at me. “Die,” he says. 

The manager is on me for bathroom breaks or something. It’s hard to stay awake during the conversation. 

Somewhere along the way I am in the break room. The big one is going through my bag. Just grunts at me and walks off after a brief look in the eye. 

“Burn,” he says.

I consider the weight of the silence that follows. How did these people get hired. Given a job. How were they even born. Given a life. A human heart. 

A woman walks into the room. A woman from upstairs. Her face is all black and blue on the sides like somebody’s had their hands on her. A bruised smile. 

“You okay?” I say, but I’m packing my bag. 

“I was watching this funny movie last night. I couldn’t stop laughing,” she says.

“What movie?”

“I don’t remember. I can’t believe my face.”

“Feels like breaking my neck just holding my head up.”

She’s yawning and looks very tired. Pay attention now. You might know someone like this. 

“Can you hold my hand?” she asks. She’s gotten behind me.

“What?”

“Please?”

“I can’t. I mean yes. I mean no.”

“Don’t worry. It’s just me.” 

“It’s not just you. It’s you.”

“Sorry. I don’t know why I said that. You don’t see many beautiful people anymore.”

Things get so bad in here I can barely begin to explain. Why get into all that jazz. I have as good a chance you listening as the man being scooped up. I couldn’t blow my own brains out to get you to pay attention. To get you to understand. I move out the door and into the smoke with the sound of gunshots all around me and not a single goodbye.  

*

Then you recognize your own life is a god’s dream. You can’t get out and you don’t much like your limitations. Used to not believe in shit like this. Small arcs floating all around with drunken captains not taking anybody on. I thought we had more time.

I’m back home. Somewhere along the way there was movement and the passage of time and place. Things just appear before me. The shape of things take form in real time. 

You hate to hear it but we will be the ones to see it. Can more than feel it. People dream about it, the oblivion. Nothing to tear you away. I’ll tie a loop with the curtain. Let me swing. The only thing I’ve ever been guilty of is faith. 

I can feel the weightless pirouetting of this place there in its crystalized Moses basket. Been lying here in dead grass looking up at a sky not cloudy but full of smoke. You can’t see nothing two feet in front of you. 

Thick droves of it vacuuming about. The hours, the days, the months, the years of it. All your love and everything labored for. A ghost where there should be a spirit. 

I thought today would be the day I would put my life back together. I don’t know what to do with myself when I’m not working. 

Something like poisonous algae foaming at the waterline. Something like wildfires on the horizon. Something like aftermath-matic silence. Like the apocalypse has already been here. The feeling of desperate times. Even the wind looks red. Something like being so broke but you pay your worth for a night’s drink and stack on months of daily internal and external ruptures while you blow up your own universe. Something like having not a single person to visit your grave. No one to carry the coffin. Something about terror. Something about cruelty. Something about inattention. Something about when a heart breaks you can hear it and see the enshrouding dark. Something about a sad song on repeat. There. There’s a story for you. The end. Something about the end. 

The sound of a saw wrenches me out of a nap. 

Haven’t slept in three days. The lucid dreaming kicks in. I’ve reached the point where I can control them. They don’t feel like dreams anymore. More like premonitions. I whisper a silent prayer and imagine my words making crooked spirals in the smoke around me. Cycling and repeating with nobody around to hear. I lose myself in the clouds and let the drugs do their work. She’s inside me, laced with zinc and dopamine, and something like a cocktail they give a sick dog.

The gray veil above opens to a mirage of missiles dropping. I can see some of the people falling to their knees. Most of us welcome annihilation with open arms. 

Blue sky turns to ash and lives collect dust. Brood out a consciousness. The first walker comes on by. I see her before she sees me. I see her turn to walk the other way then keep on coming. We are terrified of one another. She’s hurrying by and I can barely make her out through the smoke. 

An old man follows her. 

“Same shit different day,” he says.

“Is the day any different?”

“You ain’t working.”

“I was working.”

“Shit you ain’t.”

 “I was at work.”

“How so.”

“I was dreaming.”

He moves on. 

People pass by asking me to pray for the dead, no longer the false prophet. Many cannot speak for themselves. Fumble all language. When I speak it’s like the smoke around me blocks the passage of my words into their minds or their hearts. Tired faces. Mourners just looking for something to do. They walk on. 

“Do you want to buy a church?” a man says walking by. I shake my head. “Okay. Bye now.” 

A woman talks to me like a phantom. She reminds me of my mother. Resembles a whore with a stolen baby. She stops speaking when she comes up to the fence and just looks at me weeping.

“There you are. My boy, my boy, my boy,” then she is gone. 

It is a heroic feat quitting drinking. I think it might even be a miracle. Something like walking on water. Something like being God. I guess I’m God. 

Black smoke reminds me of what I was doing. It infiltrates all the white areas. I know where the darkness permeates. It wasn’t so bad. We cut each other’s heart out. 

I carry a piece of her with me now. I couldn’t finish. I have Congenital Insensitivity to Pain, CIP. I wasn’t born with it. I was born again with it. I’m numb all the time. But not in the way you’d imagine. Not like the rest of them. Every time my heart breaks, I feel it. 

I get up and shake the dust from about me and head inside toward the black smoke. A tunnel of light. My back door left open. Just a few feet from end-to-end is this tiny home. The smell of things burned and burning. Her note is in the trashcan. The smoke rises from the burnt pages. 

Died of boredom, it says. 

I walk on to the firepit in the back. She said she wanted to be a part of the clouds. In it draws the attention of you calling me to tell me it’s broken. The same dream that goes on drowning out the reality that my heavy heart is pitted on a stake. I can recall every dream but not the one I had when I lost her. The feeling, but not the shape. Even the day I met her has seemed to fade away. 

I’m left so empty. Impossible grief and a longing far out of grasp. She was better off leaving this place. I have a piece of her with me. We take our carvings. I know that it’s best that she burns. 

“Forgive me. Oh, God. Forgive us.”

What can we ultimately say.

I begin my work and the hacking of it. Making a mess of it just like we did with this love. I am butchering the meat. I hack as I dream.

*

Somewhere the black smoke engulfs it all and I find my way back to work. Selling a gun to what’s-his-face. 

“Look. I live in tent city. Came from Florida. We don’t have an address. I just got married, man.”

Nobody sees what she’s doing, the wife. I am too busy trying to wake up. The man grabs my hand but my disease doesn’t permit the feeling of human touch. Or didn’t, not until I met her. The gun really is the death of him. His wife loads a round into the gun and shoots him in the mouth. 

Pandemonium on the floor. She places the gun right down and sits on her hands just smiling. His body is face down over the glass case of guns dead on his feet. Blood everywhere. 

“Jesus,” I say, “oh God.”

Mr. Manager is on the floor barking orders for us to get back to work. His worry and panic are cinematic. I almost feel something. The other one, the one who tries hard at all this has a gun on her, placed right on her skull. 

“Do you want me to do it, sir?”

Everybody seems to have lived for this moment. Most of the others remain on their phones. The girl from upstairs exits the break room very pale holding up her hands laced with the fingers of a pair of severed hands.

“Your bag was leaking,” she says to me.

Some of today’s shooters are law enforcement and take the shooter down to the ground. I move quickly and grab the pair of severed hands. The feeling of them shocks every time. 

“Why do you have those?”

Not a stranger to walking off the job. I place the hands back into my pack and brush her aside. I never even clock in for the day. 

*

Lights follow me in the clouds the whole way. Sirens in the distance and barking dogs. I am atop the water tower. The place we met. She wanted to make the water clean again. It had become unclean for the town to drink.

She told me everything. How she intended on killing herself on that special birthday. Felt so worn out and all used up. The approaching red lights are something we’d always been running towards.

I grabbed her and passed out. I have never felt the touch before of another person until then. Woke up just floating in the water with her and our arms outstretched in the shapes of stars. 

I press her hands to my lips and jump. 

We fall together. Clouds open up, revealing a sliver of light. I think I can see the missiles falling. And when it all cuts to black there is a blast like the sound of a suicide shot. It has gotten so dark that I am dreaming in the shroud. I want to say that it’s the end of the world and in a deeper sense the end of the human spirit, but I’m holding two hands here in the darkness. 

There was crime in all this. It was what we did to one another. What we always do. What we do to ourselves and our dreams. A body at the start and the end of it. I’ve been dead all along. Maybe something like you.