By Andrea Rinard

I’ve known how to load and shoot the rifle since I was five. Mama always says that where we live, out in the ass-crack of nowhere, we have to handle our own business because by the time someone else comes, it’ll all be over. 

The first time I saw an ambulance was when one whipped by on the road to school. The red lights had washed over me where I hunched on my seat in the front of the bus, the one reserved for kindergartners like me. The lights of the ambulance and the police car behind it dappled the morning with an exotic beauty. I didn’t know they were beaconing someone’s worst day ever in bloody flashes. I wouldn’t find out until midway through the morning snack in the classroom, my fingertips oranged with Goldfish dust, that it was my own family’s worst day. The principal called me to the hallway and patted my shoulder while the office lady who recited the pledge of allegiance each morning explained it was Dad in the back of the police car and Mama in the ambulance.

When Mama got home, she taught me to shoot. She said Daddy wouldn’t be back, but you never know. I’m good. I can dot the “i” on a Budweiser can from fifty yards, but the first time I shot anything that bleeds was a rattlesnake too close to the house. I smelled it before I saw it, its musk like hot hair. It must have known what was going to happen when I came back with the rifle. It raged its fatal warning until the blast silenced it. I didn’t stay to watch it curl in on itself and flop its pulpy way into stillness, but I went back later with the shovel. Dead things belong in the ground. 

Even though Mama says we need to eat, I don’t like killing anything that doesn’t need to be killed. But Tom Flynn doesn’t want to keep shooting cans off the fence. He wants to go hunting, and I can’t keep telling him I’m busy. That only works until he stops asking, and I don’t want him to stop.

He has the longest eyelashes I’ve ever seen on a boy, and hands so big they could probably circle my neck. We started sitting together on the bus, in the same seat over the right rear wheel, when his family moved into the Phelps’s old place, and we were in the same language arts and civics classes in seventh grade. To him alone, I’m Mo. Not Timothy. Not Tim. The tiny little syllable makes his lips come together and push out like he’s getting ready for a kiss. But I know not to watch his mouth.

I’ve used up all my watching and all my not this weekends since he decided, right before we started summer vacation after eighth grade, he’s going to be the kind of high school boy who hunts. That’s why I’m tucked next to him on the narrow bench of the blind ten feet high with my rifle across our knees because his parents don’t like guns. In the moments when I’m not praying the deer are all far away from here, I’m trying not to think about Tom’s right thigh pressed against my left one, or the way my face pinked up when he took a sip of water from my bottle without wiping the edge first.

I’m listening to the tiny whistle of Tom’s breath through his nose when I see the movement to our left, about twenty yards away. It’s a young buck with six points just emerging from its antlers. Its nose touches leaves too gently to make a sound, and I turn my head to the right. Go away. Go away. Go away.

“Look,” Tom whispers, and my prayers fall to the ground. “You take it.”

“Nah. It was your idea, so you should get the first one.”

“It’s your rifle, Mo. It’s only fair.”

There’s no way he’ll get a good shot anyway, so I snug the stock and sight the deer. Mama’s voice is in my head, reminding me to look for the line of the front leg, where the heart is. Instead, I look above the mark to the scrub oak behind the buck and pick a smudge of lichen. Right when I’m tightening my finger, Tom puts his hand on my knee and squeezes. It doesn’t mean anything, but I twitch. A little, but enough. The shot hammers the silence, and the deer goes down. It’s a gut shot, and I hear the hooves scrabbling the leaves. Blood pools, washing the ground red.

“Oh, my God! You got it!” Tom squeals, and he doesn’t sound like a hunter, or even a boy going into ninth grade. 

“It’s a bad shot,” I say, looking away. I’m all kinds of a coward for so many reasons, but I can’t stay where I am while the deer’s legs piston against the ground where it fell. 

“Look at all that blood,” Tom says, and his voice is faint now. I’m not surprised when he retches, vomit spattering our shoes.

Taking a shot on a down deer is tricky, Mama said. It’s hard to make a clean kill, but I climb to the ground. The blood stains everything, and the buck’s wild eyes roll toward me as its legs keep churning, as if it’s running far away.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper as I line up my rifle one more time because there’s no one else to do this for me, and it’s my fault anyway, and everything smells like salt and iron and pine, and I’m ready this time for the sound to blast the world into pieces, but I know the swirls of red that paint my mind will always blind me, never moving past to become dim spots in the darkness.