The Rifle

The boy dropped the rifle. He did not hear it thud against the carpet, just as he had not heard it fire an instant ago. He was trapped in a vast silence, a vacuum where everything seemed ready to collapse inward. Right now all he could think about were his ribs, how they hurt from the butt of the rifle kicking him with the force of a horse’s hoof.

His father kept it in the back of the closet. The boy found it there when playing hide-and-go-seek. He was surprised by how heavy it was, as if an animal were crushed down and trapped inside it. Its barrel was as long as his arm, a beautiful black that was almost blue, cold to the touch. Its stock the color of root beer. He was standing in a square of sunlight, cradling the rifle, when his sister burst into the room and said, “Found you!” He didn’t respond, didn’t even look at her, but lifted the rifle to his cheek and stared down the line of it and popped his lips.

“I’m telling,” she said, but said it quietly and did not move from where she stood with her ponytail and her glittery T-shirt. She wore only one pink sandal — she had slipped out of the other and abandoned it somewhere in her pursuit of him — but the boy didn’t notice this either.

He was too consumed by a feeling not so different from the one he felt on Christmas morning when he swung his legs out of bed, the feeling he felt at the edge of the high dive when he began to somersault forward and lost himself between the sky and water, mixed up with excitement and hardly able to breathe. He swung the rifle in a silvery arc. He wore a bright expression, as if he had been the one to find her. “Look at this, look at me! Reach for the sky!”

And then he dropped the rifle. And his ribs hurt. And the air smelled like sulfur, like the rim of the volcano they had visited on vacation, like that.

He had done terrible things to her before. He had pushed her out of a tree and she had broken her arm in the fall. He had dared her to throw a rock at a parked car, and when she did, when she shattered the headlight, he had run off to tell his parents. He had snuck into her room while she slept and arranged her troll dolls at the foot of her bed so that when she woke they were waiting for her with a note that read, Bad Dreams. But this was different.

He had thought it unloaded. How could he have guessed that in the chamber a bullet was waiting like a wasp? It wasn’t his fault. He hadn’t wanted to play with her and she shouldn’t have been standing there with her stupid glittery T-shirt teasing his eyes like a target. Her skin was so white where it wasn’t red. He nudged her with his foot and she did not respond. There was only silence.

And then the silence, like one of those wobbling bubbles she liked to blow from a wand, burst. He could hear again. His heart like a hammer wrapped in cloth. And alongside it, the footsteps pounding up the stairs, their mother’s voice saying their names over and over again, “Caitlin, Johnny, Caitlin, Johnny, Caitlin, Johnny,” as if she too were playing the game and they were hiding from her — but soon she would find them, soon, and they would all be together again.