He Wields A Gun
He wields a gun.
He’s had this one for a while now. He thought that the way it was manufactured, what with the reinforced pins, would help. A stupid thought. He knows they’ll always fail, no matter how reinforced. The pins fail, the arrow flies wide, the enemy falls on their own sword.
Sometimes he sits on the floor, back against the wall, and slowly inserts the gun into his mouth. He tongues the cold barrel and weeps until the taste of metal is overpowered by the taste of salt. Then he takes it out, a thick thread of spittle stretched between lips and shaft, pulled until it snaps. He likes to see how long he can get it before it snaps.
Sometimes it even goes off in the process. The most exciting moments in his life are those milliseconds after the bang when he can hope his neurons are just taking their sweet time. But without fail there's never any pain. The bullet has missed by a centimeter or less. Or it’s not a bang but a click because it’s misfired, or it's caught in the barrel, or it's one of a hundred other faults. By now he thinks he's learned every possible way a gun could fail to kill someone.
He decides that when he wakes up tomorrow he’s going to shoot every person he sees until he finds someone whom he cannot kill. Another person who shares his fate, who understands. Or maybe he’ll die along the way. Wouldn’t that be a dream.
For G L A U G U S T 2 0 2 5, "He Wields A Gun."