Don't Touch

The first gun we knew came in a toolbox for the apocalypse: hammer, barrel, crushed can, pack of Newports, a ballpoint pen someone took apart. Momma said, Don't touch & we didn't—because all that could happen next seemed obvious: blue lights in the windows of houses already turned out for the evening, boys with pockets clenched in their fists. Brother says it was there—next to the TV remotes, the box of tissues—that the pistol became a whole thing. One boy grabbed at another's t-shirt & the sounds that came next were fire spreading up a staircase, the sounds of a freight train with a cement block in its tracks. The gun was afraid of nothing—not daylight, not trouble—& Brother palmed it like he was drawing from a stack of discards. When one boy jumped another, opened his temple onto concrete, where earlier in the afternoon two boys shot rock, shot scissors, soon there were spiderweb cracks in the laundromat window, holes just big enough to fit our fingers. There were stray shells that needed picking from the grass before another girl showed up with a lawnmower. Don't touch, we told kids riding big wheels in nothing but diapers & sunglasses, kids with whole collections of shells in shoe boxes. Don't touch, we told the dog, his muzzle a divining rod, his body a strung bow.