Colt

2 Minutes Read Time

A close up image of some 45 caliber ammunition
Photo by Hailey Letlow on Unsplash

I needed money after the move. That was my excuse. But really I couldn’t bear to live in another house with it, knowing it was in the side table, in the drawer above my vibrator. Unfired for years—so much potential. The inheritance came with a small box of bullets, the cardboard foxed but nearly full, the remainder in the cartridge I kept separate from the gun, the way my grandfather had. I imagined his fingerprints, index and thumb, on each bullet from that indeterminable moment when he loaded it—his short, fat fingers that smelled of leather and old playing cards—and I didn’t want to smudge them away, unloading the bullets back into the box. The loaded cartridge reminded me of a Pez dispenser, and the gun without it felt light as my heart in spring. There had been only one time when I put the two pieces together, but I never brought it to my temple, thank god. The idea of killing myself had bulleted through my brain many times in those weeks and months after my brother died and then I was diagnosed with cancer. Too much, the spark and fire. And I’d left my body, I was floating somewhere above it, a vessel floating on the surface of waves, leagues removed from my horseshoe anchor, barely aware of it on the seafloor. Something about my grandfather John’s fingerprints there, on the bullet that would do it, felt comforting, as if he would reach into me and pinch out a candle flame. But my first therapist, the one to which I said that I wouldn’t survive myself if I Photo by Hailey Letlow on Unsplashdidn’t get back inside my body, guided me through a meditation that ended in my grandparents’ kitchen, where my grand- father was whistling. I suddenly felt as if I had arrived into my body, the way a train arrives into a station, and there, in my memory, was my grandfather, whistling in his kitchen, the feeling of his arm around me. The memory was so visceral that my body felt in two places at once, on the couch in my therapist’s office and standing in his arms.

Read more from Issue 16.2.

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