BANG BANG

There is a certain flavour of happiness, maybe it’s called peace, that comes from tragedy. That’s what I’ve tried to capture in this story. I hope it delivers.

Thanks for being here.

Bang Bang by Sherry Cassells

My brother’s best friend was at our kitchen table every morning, there was an air of exclusivity about him and my mother, I felt he dipped into my share of her and I was mean to him because of it.

Also. He had survived what my brother had not, he was only missing the last three fingers on his left hand like a gun – bang bang – and I was missing an entire person, you’d think that sentence would end right there but there’s more, my father was in his own way also missing, he had been drunk ever since the accident and I did not fault him, had that option been available to me I would have taken it.

Still I wish I had been kinder. I mean the shit we do when we’re young we can never shake off, when we see one another even now there’s the tiniest bit of chewing tinfoil, he has prosthetic fingers but there’s still a gun, he was driving the car, he was blameless but where else could I shove it, the blame I mean, for me it didn’t just get absorbed into the horror of things like it had for my mother, I wanted to shoot him down.

I said bang bang in my head every time I came into the kitchen for breakfast.

Seven days a week he was there. I don’t think my father ever knew this, time didn’t pass in years or seasons those days, time didn’t pass, but there came a day a snowstorm hit early and Boo, his name was Benjamin Oliver O’Kell, he barely made it the three miles to our place. For the first time ever I beat him to the kitchen and I felt his absence in panic, where’s Boo? came out of my mouth before I could stop it, my mother was worrying out the front window and just as I came to her side he appeared in the absolute white, my mother turned and took me in her arms for a single beat of her heart. It had never occurred to me until that moment I could have blamed the weather all along.

But that’s a tough lane to switch into.

He had to stay for two nights. The snow was impenetrable. There were pins and needles everywhere, a sort of static discomfort. The power went out and time kicked in. He brought in wood and kept the fire mad, soon as it would threaten mellow comfort he’d throw on some cedar and we’d get galaxies and crackles, the pins and needles were for where he would sleep and in whose pyjamas. I made the decision. I brought a tracksuit and blankets to the couch, gun cocked he thanked me, and if there’s one thing I could change it would be the way I looked at him in that moment.

I’d really like to change that.

I’m not sure I believe him but he remembers it differently, he remembers that I saved him that night, we are brothers now, he says the look I gave him was pure, he actually uses that word, pure, he doesn’t say pure what, he says he doesn’t think he would have made it through the night in my brother’s room and he shoots me down, bang bang, when I say I wish I’d been kinder. 

Sorry but this is youtube, there’s an ad, and it’s from The Voice, but worth it!