My First Gun
by Penny Jackson
I’m in Hollywood but it’s Florida, not L.A. Five minutes to midnight, New Year’s Eve. A boardwalk filled with glittering shards of smashed beer bottles. Girls wearing stiletto heels and too much eyeliner teeter across the boardwalk like acrobats. Strobe lights from clubs wash our faces with green and red lights. Already someone in an alley is throwing up. Josh, the boy I love, is walking six feet ahead of me with another girl, Claudia, whom he just met at the hotel pool. Claudia looks like Julie Christie from an old movie I saw on the plane, but if possible, she is even more beautiful. I am devastated.
I love Josh too much. I am sixteen years old and never had fallen in love before. And it’s really falling. Every time I see him, my knees buckle and I see the ground rushing toward my face.. If I touch him, the feel of his skin, the smell of his skin, stays with me like a tactile scent. His eyes are green and hazel and his lashes are longer than mine. I didn’t realize until now that boys can be not only handsome, but beautiful. Handsome seems trite. Beautiful really hurts.
The boy in front of me, an ordinary boy wearing a Miami Dolphins sweatshirt, jeans and red high top sneakers, suddenly sways and falls onto the boardwalk. Something shiny and hard falls out of his pocket and suddenly the crowd just stops. Freezes. No one says a word as the boy’s gun lies next to an abandoned carton of popcorn. A gun. I’ve never seen a real gun before. I stand there, curious and strangely not scared. Perhaps it’s because Josh is killing me. Maybe I want to die. Maybe I want someone else to die.
Josh is gently touching Claudia’s cheek and then leans over to kiss her. I kneel down to pick up the gun. It’s heavier than I thought and feels cold even in this heat.
I point the gun at Josh and Claudia, who lean against the wall, heavily breathing. Can I do it? My ears are filled with the explosions of the fireworks. How loud can a gun’s blast be? Will anyone notice? I wonder if Josh’s blood will be the same color as Claudia’s. Maybe after I shoot them, I’ll place the gun against my forehead and pull the trigger. When you love someone that much, you can do anything.
“Hey that’s mine!’
The boy in the Miami Dolphins sweatshirt roughly grabs the gun away from me. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he hisses before disappearing back into the crowd. I watch him walk into the bright lights and clanging bells into a pinball arcade.
Josh and the girl are gone. I look up into the sky. The moon is as silver as the boy’s gun. Could I have really shot Josh, the girl and even me? I am sixteen. I sink down and weep.
I will never see another gun until twenty years later, when the man who is my husband is slamming my head hard against the refrigerator door. He is shouting obscenities. This is not the first time. Once he broke my arm in three places. “Accidents can happen,” my husband explained to friends, claiming I slipped on ice.
He turns to pick up his whiskey bottle and I see the gun on the table. Although my head is spinning, I grab his gun and point it to the back of his head. He doesn’t see me as he holds his whiskey bottle to his mouth. My husband’s gun is heavy but my aim is steady. When you hate someone that much, you can do anything.
Suddenly, I remember that New Year’s Eve in Florida so many years ago. I am transported to that boardwalk, the smell of sulfur from the fireworks, hear the applause of the crowd, see Josh gently stroking the cheek of his new girlfriend. I didn’t shoot Josh that night. I didn’t shoot anyone. But this time is different. Accidents can happen.
Penny Jackson is a writer who lives in New York City. Her stories and poems have appeared in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, StoryQuarterly, Real Fiction, The Croton Review, The Edinburgh Review, The Ontario Review, and other magazines. Her stories have been published in the collection L.A. Child by Untreed Reads and her novel, Becoming the Butlers was published by Bantam Books. She has been a MacDowell Colony Fellow in Fiction and also a Mireliies Fellow in Creative Writing at Stanford University. Penny is also a playwright and a screenplay writer and can be found on Instagram @Pennyjackso_ and Twitter: @pennyplaywright.