An American Memory

In one of my visits to America, I was struck with a pattern. Wherever I went the glowing box screamed in the background, selling soap, sugary cereals, selling what kind of body I should have/be attracted to.

I sought refuge in the old house on the hill that used to be wallpapered with pictures of four generations, of fires and presents and smiles.

A blizzard cut the power. The house was shadows; the blue of winter seeped through the windows; now filled with shifting ghosts, pictures strewn on the floor like fallen leaves. My grandparent’s death brought autumn to the house.

We spoke in hushed voices, magnified by the lack of the electric hum.

And my uncle said those magic words.

“Hey. I got a beebee gun.”

My uncle moved to Oklahoma about fifteen years ago, returned when his parents died with a daughter and a monkey on his back. The South stretched his vowels out, giving him a lazy but comfortable sounding drawl. Drink stretched it out a bit further.

A rat had been eating the pigeon feed. My uncle bought some lead pellets just in case he didn’t get a kill shot. He gave me a cowboy hat and we set out into the cold and wet night. The top of the hill disappeared into the cloud bank. It was everything that TV wasn’t. Gloomy, cold, the only movement falling snow.

“Wait, I got just the thing,” my uncle said and ran back in the house.

He came back a few moments later carrying a cardboard box and set it on one of the wooden benches. Rush Limbaugh’s smarmy face stared back at me. My uncle had taped a Newsweek cover to the side of the box.

“Aim for his nose first. It’s hard to miss.”

We shot Rush for a while, filling his paper face with bee-bees and grinning like idiots each time we came remotely close to our targets.

We turned our sights higher at the snow-capped itchy bombs that dangled from the tree. There was no conversation.

1. Pump the handle to pressurize the chamber

2. Cock the gun and watching that perfect silver orb load into the chamber

3. Line the neon-green dot between the cleft of the site

4. Squeeze the trigger with the perfect center of your finger pad

5. The whiz of air and the burst of brown seeds like the red spray of a successful kill

Once the itchy bomb was stripped to its core, we called it a night.

Inside, the the lights had sputtered back to life and with them came The Family Guy. Our fingers and noses thawed in the glow of the television.  It winked at us and we were completely seduced.

Outside, a rat indulged.

-C

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 22nd, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under All Comics, Incompletes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.