iii.3

COLD NOVEMBER

BY AARON CROSBY

It took me awhile to dig this sucker out. My closet’s a mess with the crummy floor all full of cardboard boxes and all the boots jumbled by the door and the shirts crumpled in the corners 'cause when they fall off the racks you don’t even know they’re down there - the shirts - it just seems like you all the sudden got more hangers. Anyways I found it and a bunch of old flannel shirts too, so I guess I won’t have to do laundry for a good while now. 

Browning. Ya know they don’t make them with real wood like this anymore unless ya pay special, but all the regular ones come with plastic stocks like little Ronald McDonald guns or somethin'. Like Ken doll guns or somethin'. Donny B he got himself a new Remington with the real wood - ordered it special from a guy in Pine City - and his new wife got his name engraved right there on the butt. I guess that means if old DB ever fires the damn thing shirtless he’ll get a nice little tattoo or somethin' like that. Be just like Donny to go hunting duck on a half-frozen crick without his shirt on, the crazy son of a bitch. Probably in a blizzard or something too. Those boys of Tonya’s get him to do crap like that, even with the dialysis he’s got in the cities couple times a week. He’s like a chocolate lab, an old one that don’t know he’s supposed to just lay down by the fire and let the new Chesapeake rollick out of that water with a bird in his mouth and steam rising off his back. 

This here gun I got though still don’t feel like mine. I remember watching the old man ream it out. This grease still smells metallic, like how I think my fillings would taste if I got hit by lightning. The memory of how he clacked the bolt in like his fingers were God’s fingers still makes me feel so small, like the knowledge of everything that had ever been was in those fingers and no matter how hard I squeezed them I could never absorb it. I got newspapers open to the public notices to set it on so I don’t gum up the tablecloth. Darlene had all these creased vinyl table cloths for all the different seasons and the one I got on the table now has little scarecrows in front of red barns and they’re all huddled together in the middle of these wide open fields ready for harvest. It’s just the same pattern repeated over and over across and over and over down. Once I looked at all of the scarecrows to see if they were all exactly identical. They all have smiles painted on and they are waving up at the ceiling so I don’t think they really know or care. I still change the table cloth every month too. 

I got all the guts sitting out next to it and I feel a little ashamed that I need to unfold the yellow instructions to remember how to put it all back together. No matter how many times I take this gun apart and put it back together it will always be his, and no matter how many people come over for coffee after church there will always be an empty spot full of unresolved tension like the last tomato that stays green forever. I can’t sit facing the window or I keep watching, ready to pour an extra cup for her. 87 years and these synovial bolts, his bones and our vacuous chamber are all I can touch with these rheumatoid digits.