Grayspace

Child Soldier

I bought a gun from a child soldier.

She was probably eleven years old. She looked forty. Both of her legs were gone. She got around on a skateboard and wore a red cap backwards, rubbed brown from dirt. Her dreadlocks were natural; born of sweat and the dust of the street corner. I turned down what she tried to sell me first, and then she offered me this piece with a glint of desperation in her face.

I don't know my faces. She could have been Ethiopian, Cuban, or anything. She had protruding large lips and eyes that didn't seem to focus, always looking at the horizon behind me and all the looming buildings.

It had three bullets.

I didn't know that until I jokingly mimed a shot at a glass beer bottle someone left on my fence. The trigger grated as if hindered by rust, but the hammer pounded something live and the bottle exploded and my ears rang.

I didn't know about the second bullet until Trish came home early and I was sprawled out on the couch with a paltry fence of brown bottles on the coffee table. She trotted around the living room saying something intense. I couldn't make it out. Those arched eyebrows over those bluest of blue eyes. That tramp stamp on the exposed small of her back that reminded me of barbed wire. She seemed to be running laps as she babbled. It annoyed me, I guess. So again, as a joke, I raised the piece and pulled the trigger. It was supposed to be funny. The hammer fell on another live round and Trish stopped babbling and pacing.

It was funny for a few seconds.

If there was another bullet left, it was for whatever cop, detective, or would-be inlaw that would try my apartment door. That's what I thought at first.

Trish lay with me for several nights, getting colder each round.

The quiet was nice.

It might have been the third night, after another douse of drink, that I tried putting some lipstick on her. I found out pretty quick that I don't know anything about makeup. Less than she did.

I tried kissing her. Her lips were papery and dry. The belch that had been gestating inside of her for days finally ribbited out. I'm pretty sure I threw up for an hour.

The longer nobody came to the door, the more I believed the last bullet was for someone else.

Maybe it was for me.

Not that I knew there was a third bullet or not. Maybe there was ten. Or none.

All I know is that when I put the piece to my head, and the trigger stuttered with the rust in the mechanism, the hammer again landed on something live. A third shot.

I woke up in some place with a high, vaulted ceiling like a church. Sunlight broke into thousands of rainbow colors by a central window depicting something...

...I couldn't place. It was much more complicated than a cross. I did my share of Googling biblical symbolism, and this depiction was utterly alien to anything Christian.

And yet there were wooden pews staring straight ahead to a dark wooden altar and pulpit. I was lying in the aisle. In a puddle of blood? Urine? Sweat? I couldn't tell. The smell of my own person was overwhelming. The only thing I was certain of was the fact I wasn't dead.

A girl of about fourteen in a robe as white as a lily began mopping around me. Water sloshed as the dirty water tried to rinse the implement before I felt more pushing and prodding from the wet tendrils against my bare body.

I was naked.

She didn't seem to notice. If she noticed, she didn't care. She looked like a much younger Trish. The blue eyes more blue. The golden hair more golden. Before all the late teen years of beer and sex and grief induced by reckless behaviour she went through before she found me.

She was singing. I guess some gospel hymn. Her voice was fragile, angelic, like crystal.

As the mop bluntly thudded against me, I heard other voices. A choir. I couldn't hold back the tear that fought to join the pool of bodily fluids I lay in.

I rose from my personal soup to get closer to the music. There was a narrow doorway behind the pews. So narrow I had to squeeze through, and I'm not a large man.

Neither was it a large room. It could have passed for a walk-in closet. The walls were propped up by folding tables set up with every last square inch taken up by pictures.

Black and white photographs of me and Trish. Not just when we were together. But before we met. Me when I went fishing with my uncle. Her winning some second grade baking contest with something made from modeling clay. She was missing a tooth.

Me from a fight I just barely won in the schoolyard. My left eye swollen shut and fat and dark.

I don't remember anyone there having a camera.

I jumped when the girl with the mop was behind me and she started rambling. She was saying things about the human body. The male anatomy and the female anatomy and the most obscure details of the functions of each every last organ. As if she were narrating the most medically tedious script for a pornographic film. The more she talked, the more she shuddered and the more her eyes bugged out.

I felt uncomfortable and pushed past her back into the sactuary.

It was on fire.

The flames were violet.

Purple light threw pulsating shadows of the wooden beams high above.

My skin tingled as much as it burned. Pain mingled with... Mint?

I wish Trish were here so I could say I'm sorry.

I know she wouldn't believe me. But at least I could say it.

You know. For all the things she's accused me of never saying.

I wriggle back into the room full of photos. It's on fire too, cascading with all shades of purple.

I grab up the most familiar picture of Trish I can see. It's one I had actually seen before. Her with her Dad, right before he passed.

She was what, 18?

I hold the picture against me like I would have held her. The frame is rigid and sharp, not entirely unlike her.

I hold on to her picture for dear life.

No.

I'm holding on to a pistol. It throbs as I'm holding it against my breasts, which have just begun to take shape. The wind whips my sweaty dreadlocks into my eyes, and my pulse makes thunder in my head on this blistering sunny day. I've emptied all but three rounds from the magazine. with the last shot, a bald black head over the dune erupted in a pink mist.

My commander shouts at us to advance on the enemy's position.

In just a few steps, a button inches under the soil will depress.

And my legs will be gone.