Category: Fiction

The house, a simple box nailed to a concrete slab on the flat surface of West Texas, had fallen into disrepair in the years since he was a boy. A window on the side was punched out and the jagged center was patched with cardboard; the masking tape had released its hold long ago. The window had once been the window to his bedroom. He got out of his rented red Ford and went to look. The houses on the left and right were close; the rock fights had been in earnest. The cheap siding, a dirty white vinyl, was cracked in places, probably from the hailstorms that came every summer. There were broken children’s toys in the yard. No one was home.

Mama never told me how to do anything. She modeled. She said if I was anything like her, I didn’t need anyone to tell me what to do, because when that happened with her—and people were always telling her what to do—she did the opposite.

11:56 pm and the concrete felt like a griddle.  The sweat on June’s feet hissed steam against the broken rock, not that you could’ve heard it over the racket coming out of the river bottom down the way.  Crickets and frogs, mostly.  Full moon shining like a streetlamp - only light out there, shone the stars out.

The father handed the box to the grandfather, and he cocked his head as if acknowledging his son should have the honor. The father ripped off the paper, opened the box, and removed a black gun.

That couldn’t really be a gun. I stared with my mouth open as the baby held out his hands and wiggled his little fingers just out of its reach. Then the grandfather placed the end of that shiny black pistol into the baby’s mouth, who sucked on it like a new toy.