Alone At Home
At eight, he was old enough to understand that his dad, who had died two years before, wasn’t coming back. Dad was gone for good. When he had first gotten the news that Dad hadn’t survived the surgery, he was incredulous.
Daddy couldn’t die!
Attending the funeral, seeing the coffin lowered into the ground, hearing the clods rain down to bury it, watching his mother wail, all this began to forge an understanding of what had happened, leaving an aching vacancy in his chest.
He didn’t cry a lot, but he missed his dad.
The loss had a twist. With his mother, grandmother and three sisters left in the family, he felt another kind of loneliness, the absence of someone to show him how to do stuff, to do the stuff men do.
Nobody else was home on that weekday afternoon. Grandma was at her house, Mom and the two oldest sisters were at work, and his other sister was at an after school activity. He was home alone, and wandered around the apartment.
Mom’s room wasn’t really off limits, but he rarely explored it. Restless, he went into her room and opened the closet there. The faint cosmetic odor was familiar. Rummaging through a suitcase he found in a corner, he discovered what looked like a tin cookie can and began prying the lid off.
As the tin opened he caught a sharp, acrid whiff…of something. He saw something swathed in an oily rag. He unwrapped it. It was Dad’s gun.
He hefted the Colt .25 semi-automatic, struck by, excited by, its compact weight. To better explore his find, he carried the tin and its contents to the dining room table. Peering closely, he read the precise lettering on the pistol’s side, then stroked the black checkered bakelite handgrips with their prancing colts.
It was Dad’s gun.
At the base of the hand grip, he saw a grooved button. He fingered it back, and was startled by the emergence of the magazine.
Sliding out the magazine, he studied the bullets nestled within. Cautiously he pushed the top bullet out and let it clatter on the table top. Then, with growing confidence, he removed the five remaining bullets. Their brass gleamed contrast with the leaden noses.
He decided to play a game. He put the six bullets in the inverted cookie tin lid, lining them up against the lid’s rim. Then he began to tilt the lid around so that the chain of six bullets ran around its circumference.
It’s like a train.
Time was passing and someone might be getting home soon. He could get into real trouble if he got caught. He began pushing the bullets back into the magazine. It was a lot harder than getting them out, but he managed. He pushed the magazine back into the gun’s butt, and smiled at the satisfying click.
He started to wrap the gun back up in its oily cloth, but then stopped. Holding the gun by the butt, he looked at the opening at the end of the barrel. It looked back at him.
He squeezed, and a white, unending silence exploded.
Alvin G. Burstein, a psychologist and psychoanalyst, is a professor emeritus at the University of Tennessee and a former faculty member of the New Orleans-Birmingham Psychoanalytic Center with numerous scholarly works to his credit. He writes a monthly movie review column, A Shrink at the Flics, for the e-newspaper, Psychology Times. He is a member of Inklings, a writers critique group that meets weekly to review its members’ imaginative writings. Burstein has published flash fiction and autobiographical pieces in e-zines; The Owl, his first novelette, is available at Amazon. He is a committed Francophile, unsurprisingly a lover of fine cheese and wine, and an unrepentant cruciverbalist
