God’s voice, low and muffled, reaches me in the darkness, as if he’s calling to me from the other side of a bathroom door.

“Shit. Hang on a sec. Minor snafu. Am I getting through to you? Give a sign if you can hear me” he sings. 

My skull and all its contents burden my neck, but I dip forward and strain to lift this weighty thing.

“Remember to breathe, kid.”

God speaks with a benevolent indifference.

“If you don’t breathe you’re going to trigger a panic attack. Just breathe.”

God’s coaching me through my own death.

“Eeeeasy, fella. Your heart rate’s up. I’m not responsible for anxiety-induced aneurysms.” He chuckles. “Actually, I’m not responsible for anything that happens to you. But today’ll be a good day. A better day. Just breathe.”

His voice disappears, and I’m alone in the darkness, in the quiet before the chaos, left to think how for some, good days are as common as breaths. If that were the case, then I’m more of a COPD patient, stage 4, a lunger numbering each inhale, counting each gasp. I’d count this a good day, a win, if I could close it out without pissing myself. 

I don’t like that my winning days are countable entities. 

I have to pee, or I’m telling myself I have to pee because I’ve been conditioned to associate this moment with pissing myself. Should have emptied the bladder before entering the darkness. Despite God’s half assurance, I’m harboring, perhaps even nurturing, a hunch this will be another bad day. What is there to fear except my relaxed urethral sphincter? It’s just an accident, but this kind of accident produces cold stiff jeans and the ammonia cloud of embarrassment that would hover over me and rain down. At the moment, though, the tingling between my hips fails the field sobriety test, weaving over the line between bodily urge and conscious thought. If translated into words, urge would lead to pressure, and pressure would demand action, and the valves damming the flood would no longer hold. 

Damn the valves and the pressure and urges. Exercise control before you lose it.

I don’t like how often I’ve felt I could lose it. How often I wouldn’t mind losing it. 

Another discomfort, another tingle, this one in my right elbow. A nerve pressed and misfiring. Right arm aching with the weight of some dead thing, fingers contorted, cold, nearly numb. But the air is warm, thick with wood polish and frying oil and disinfectant. 

And suddenly, I’m not alone. An electric red X bigger than God slashes the darkness. The top right arm of the flaming letter darkens and glows, dies and flashes alive just to die again, all with the crackle of something broken breaking further.  

An X on the fritz. My left eye’s twitching, syncing with the sputtering letter, a series of stutters and blinks. 

X marks the spot. 

Game over. 

My vision doesn’t blur, but my eyes water, the pressure in my throat wringing all moisture up and out. I taste the salt at the corner of my mouth and want to laugh—how silly, to cry—but I have no breath, not even to scoff. My chest aches and my heart, jerking as if commandeered by someone unfamiliar with stick shift, buckles my knees. When my jaw drops to trigger, not an aneurysm, but a deep intake of air, my shoulders collapse, pain exploding my ribs, quick as the pulsing X. 

And then I’m upright again, entranced. 

Somewhere birds chirp. A boy speaks.

In shoes thin and flat and uncomfortable I spread and scrunch my toes. The ground rumbles. 

No, it’s not a plane.

Boom! Woom, woom, woom, woom

“Helicopter,” I whisper before remembering. No. Balls. This slow rolling doom, this volley of cannon fire merges with the melodic fingerpicking, quiet, distant, somewhere on God’s side of the bathroom door. My chest hurts.

The X is not alone. My vision’s zooming out. XI. EXIT. Get out.

woom, woom, woom, woom

The sign’s high at the far end of a dark lane, a light above a black door that disappears in the wall. A fallen feather of light burns in the gap between floor and door. Safety’s on the other side of that door, too, too far away. 

Oooh, oooh no. It’s starting.

My molars crunch when the crack and tumble of ball scattering pins, like a hypnotist’s snapped fingers, dislodges my gaze. Consciousness retrieved. My limbs jolt as if charged with two paddles’ worth of resurrection. A soul returning to the body. A body awakened to wounds unhealed, pains untended, no ointments to administer, no salve to apply. Only the ache of living. 

I remember it all, even as it happens.

The black ball causing my right hand to cramp reflects none of the fluorescent lights, unlike the orange and green and pink balls racing down the lanes. Still, I can make out the white etched 1 and 6. Too heavy, should be in my left. “Makes no sense,” I whisper, “but I’ll allow it.”

“And that right there, boys, is a foul, but we’ll allow it.” 

That playful patriarch’s voice frightens me.

My entire body contracts, elbow jammed into oblique, shoulder raised to ear, spine curved into that punctuation culminating the age-old question, Why? My foot, of course, is over the line. I glance left. Above the rented shoes two twig legs in deep blue jeans, slim and stiff, stand pinched, hobbled. A great gut of many meals for many years overhangs where a belt might be. The tracks of broad red and blue and white plaid coast my eyes over the man’s pear body to the voice’s face. He looks like everybody and nobody, any neighbor in suburbia who in his retirement keeps his weekly appointment at the barber shop, keeps the silver hairs off and out of his ears, keeps the promises to his grandchildren, including Thursday night bowling. The trio share a face, an oval flattened at the top. Teeth more horse than human cast their joy into the bowling alley’s darkness in luminous yellowish green. Bulbous noses support square-framed glasses shielding marble blue eyes. 

Last time I saw the trio I wet myself, reduced to a terrified child. I clench; not today. My stomach tightens, and the sick gurgles in my throat, yet my reflection in the old fart’s glasses just stands caressing its ball. 

“Now watch how your grandpa bowls a strike.”

The old man approaches the line, his ball hovering before his face like some neon magic orb. His right arm drops with neither a grunt nor an exhale. The arm moves forward as his right leg cuts behind his left, his knee grazes the approach, and he holds that pose the ball’s entire journey foot by foot over the boards, holds it after the last pin disappears into the ball pit, holds it as his grandsons press their faces into his and scream their approval for his ten-pin prowess. 

I blink, and they’re  still screaming, silent mouths open, but not wide, pupils locked behind splattered lenses, bodies motionless and bloody beneath the pile of flesh that was their grandfather. 

My chest hurts. I blink, choke on the air, and they’re back, a grandfather laughing, sturdy, celebrated and loved by boys whose mouths wide with wonder express at high volumes their pride for both his accomplishment and their blood relation to him. 

Strikes all around burst like falling bombs.

“You’re a corpse, grandpa. No shield. You can’t protect them. You’ll drop on them like a griddle press. Squeeze their juices out. So smile and laugh and have yourself a great fucking time.”

“They can’t hear you,” God, half distracted, sings to me, the third syllable rising a key before returning. 

No shelter here.

All around me laughter detonates like landmines. Their happiness doesn’t disturb me as much as it confuses me. They laugh without reason, inexplicable laughter, and they smile without bearing the pain of muscles contorted out of their fashion. It looks natural on them, but when I try to reflect their joy, I feel like a prisoner trapped in a carnival mirror, all distorted and fake and cruel. 

Throughout the bowling alley groups gather around pitchers and clear plastic pints. My table is bare. No beers. No sodas. No mozzarella sticks or chicken fingers. Just a thick varnish wearing away, chipping and leaving the table vulnerable to dings and scratches. Booms of laughter break large men in half, bending them to the beer pitchers half-emptied on the wood tables. When they recover, red cheeked and watery eyed, their faces glow. Men two hundred, three hundred pounds, somehow lighter in their appearance and spirit than me. 

All these people, adrift in their dinghies, separate vessels kept afloat by mirth. To approach any of these tables would be to drop on them like an anchor, pull them down to my level, to the darkness, to what feels like home. Yet it brings no joy. I don’t know what joy is, and that’s on me. 

At the bar men in matching receding hairlines, teal shirts, and expandable waist jeans bark into each other’s faces, deep, playful barks, like frisky dogs teasing their playpals on the other side of a chain link fence. They slap backs, squeeze necks, jostle elbows, pour pints, and stack twenties in a wet pile on the bar. 

After the kid with the backward red cap wins the poop emoji from the claw machine, those teal torsos will be stacked in a wet pile under the bar. 

Oh, brave new world.

I don’t even know the sound of my own laugh. My throat’s dry. They all laugh as if lubricated to make such noises. I can’t understand it, can’t appreciate it. What, then, should I do with it? What, then, should I do to it?

Above the mass of teal shirts and shiny scalps a steady red exit sign beams. Underneath it waits a keg delivery, three high, three deep, five wide.

“They blocked the door.”

“Massacres can’t happen on their own,” God says.

Oooh, oooh no.

The coins clunk into the claw machine. Music tinkles out, a tune reminiscent of a knight’s quest on some ancient gaming system, a song that begins with inspiration, with hope and, as time runs low, slides into a dirge.

Behind me the glass door at the main entrance groans and slams shut with a triple thwap. The end’s approaching.

“My chest hurts.”

“Just breathe.”

“Did you? Did you press it?”

“Time’s running out. Push it.”

Pins fall. Hands slap five. No one curses a gutter or faults a hook.

“Did you? Did you get it?”

“You’ve got it. You’ve got it.”

The boy in the red cap reaches into the machine’s glass door. In the arcade groups of teens frantically punch buttons to ravage their opponent’s life bar, and they take aim at zombies and laugh and scream. Behind me a series of clicks, patient, practiced, precise. 

The red-capped kid heaves his victorious turd above his friends. 

The muzzle flames will claim us all. 

I flinch more at the sight than the sound. The turd and the hand holding the turd pop into the air as the kid drops, as the kids drop. The bowling team in teal do their best impression of a 7-10 split. The two remainders round the bar in opposite directions and collide with the kegs. Blood and beer and now powder join the frying oils and disinfectant in the air. 

So much pain.

Bodies trample each other in their dash toward the distant EXIT. They glide down red lanes and stall in gutters like hurled balls that just don’t have the oomph to make it. 

“Grandpa and the kids are dead,” I say, staring down at the promise kept. “Goodbye.”

“Just breathe.”

I steal half  a breath, and the bullet tumbles like an acrobat on fire though flesh and organs, claiming chunks of bone, forcing out the skin in a massive exit wound beneath my right nipple. The sixteen pound ball beats me to the ground, and I collapse on top of it. My body’s twitching, feet dancing on the boards, mouth spitting blood and foam on the approach. Grandpa’s screaming silently in my face, “That’s a foul, but I’ll allow it,” and I’ll count today a win if I don’t piss myself. 

The fingerpicking on God’s side of the bathroom door escorts me to the darkness. 

* * *

“Hang on,” he says. “Can’t tell you how many people damage themselves after the event. Broken noses and split lips and goose eggs on their foreheads. Just hold tight.”

A steady industrial marching fills the silence, then a dreary riff.

“Last wire. Hang on. Okay. Open your eyes, slowly. Let your pupils adjust to the light.”

I feel drained. Emptied. Incapable of stitching together a pair of syllables, but my problem is not his.

“Annnnd, he is risen! Welcome back to the world of the living.” He is shorter than I am, hunched slightly, hands on his knees, staring up at me. His face is full, tan, and hairless. A tight understanding grin puffs his cheeks, and eyes large and light beam from beneath the scuffed brim of his Dead Man’s Brewing baseball cap. He nods at my crotch, then steps back to reveal the polished concrete floor beneath us. “What’d I say? Good day, right? You look shaken, but dry. God blesses us with small victories. Dry pants for you, and no puddles for me.”

He unclips and removes my headset, placing the bulky device on a makeshift pallet table. My neck rejoices. 

“Take a minute. Have a water or a juice. I’ll meet you back at the counter.” He raises his hand, thick and powerful, and in the moment I see the red-cap kid and the poop emoji, and I flinch. He squeezes my shoulder. “Take your time. I’ll see you outside.”

The hydraulic arm eases the glass door shut behind him, ruffling the raised plastic blinds. I grab one of the lunch-box-sized apple juices from the same table holding the headset. My fingers fumble the straw trapped in its clear case, so I jam my pinky nail through the foil seal and squirt the box into my mouth. My heart retreats from my throat, but my head still pounds. The mini water bottles seem to bounce with the rhythm of my life. I twist the cap and swallow down in two gulps all the bottle has to offer. Beneath my flannel my black Hanes t-shirt is damp and cold. My rhythm slows. I close my eyes and yawn, and that dead-eyed grandpa’s yawning back at me. 

“Mother fucker!” If this time is like the last two, the nightmares will come, as will the flashbacks, intense, real. I wish I could just slip out the front door like I did those other times, but peeking through the door, I see him and only him at the counter scrolling on his phone. It’s a Tuesday morning, and the store’s dead, which was what I wanted. Plans backfire. He’s going to ask if I’m ready to make a purchase. “Fuck.” I palm the juice box and water bottle and force myself out of the room.

I’m on God’s side of the bathroom door now, and the music is loud enough to rattle the glass cases separating buyers from sellers but low enough so I don’t have to scream for his attention. He slides the phone behind his laptop, lifts up the garbage pail behind the counter, and greets me with a grin. No tripping over my tongue and garbling out words to plead for eye contact. I drop my trash in his bin. A small act of mercy duly noted. 

“So, is today a good day or a great day? We have it in stock. The sixteen inch, right? What were you going to use it for?” 

My heart skips; I swear I could carve the traitor out if not for the inconvenience. 

He slides the waiver I signed onto the glass counter, reaches behind him for the laptop, a battered Mac nearly unrecognizable beneath layers of stickers: Remington, Dead Man’s Brew, Smith & Wesson, Java Joe’s, Mando, The Caffeinated Hag, Colt, Yoda, but the old, hair hanging out the ears Yoda. His raised eyebrow indicates he’s awaiting an answer.

“Hunting,” I lie.

His eyebrow drops and brings the other with it forming a V above his nose. “Whattaya hunt?”

I do my best impression of a fish. I can’t name a single wild animal I’d like to kill. 

“Do you have your hunting license with you?”

My head responds in the negative.

“Do you have a hunting license?”

I shake. This good day is turning to shit. “I’m sorry,” I say, “I can’t…”

He waves off my apology. “Nothing to be sorry about. The VR trip is good for a month. Change your mind within thirty days, come back in, make your purchase. No pressure. But we can pre-fill the paperwork so when you’re ready you can just sign and pay. Word of advice? If you really want to buy, secure the license first. You don’t need it, but it will reduce the chance of getting flagged. Go big. Think boar. Think deer. Ever had venison stew?” 

I shake my head.

His eyes and head roll back and to the side. His shoulders bounce in disbelief. “Some buddies and I have a deal. We pool the meat each season. Each guy buys in with $250 bucks. Biggest bag of the season takes the jackpot, but for every kill, we all get a taste. I still have half a freezer in the basement stocked with meat. These guys,” he points at his hat, “make a Winter Solstice Vigil Stout, I’m talking dark, but floral with hints of cherries.” He places both elbows on the casing as if in prayer. “Onions, carrots, venison, stout, stock, peas, mushrooms—” his right hand karate chops the air. “I have another buddy who grows mushrooms under his deck. Cremini, oyster, shitake. Whatever he has, I throw those in with potatoes, bay leaves, paprika, salt, pepper, a touch, look at me—” he holds his fingers to his eye as if playing the smallest violin, “a touch of anise.” He’s staring through me at a pot into which he could fall and swim and disappear for a week. “Of course, if you don’t hunt, if it’s for self-defense, just say so. However, if you’re looking for self-defense, this might be the wrong option for you. They’re not complicated, easy to customize. Ever fired one?”

My nonresponse says everything.

“I don’t peddle peace of mind. You can’t buy that. I want what makes the most sense for you.” Grunting and cursing his knees, he ducks beneath the counter. “Here!” His hand shoots up flapping a neon yellow flier. “Man it’s a blast getting old,” he says, returning to the counter with a smile and a wink. “Take this. Every other Saturday I host a Q&A at Roosevelt’s Pistol and Rifle Range.” He slides the paper to me. It’s the type of thing a child or a sociopath would create for a school project or a ransom note. Times New Roman, Comic Sans, Old English, Jokerman— I give up identifying the fonts because their kaleidoscopic horizontal, vertical, and diagonal tumblings make me want to pry my eyeballs out with my thumbs. 

COME FOR THE DONUTS, STAY FOR THE LESSONS

9–1 ROOSEVELT’S PISTOL & RIFLE RANGE

BIG FRANK WILL ANSWER ALL YOUR QUESTIONS

Cartoonish donuts fall from the heavens, a half dozen piling up on a pair of criss-crossed rifle barrels.

“Not bad, right? My kid did the drawings. We get the donuts and coffee from Garfield’s. Coffee’s better than the donuts, but,” his eyes trail up and left. He lifts his finger as if to shush some blasphemy, “they did have this bacon and bourbon donut with a salted caramel drizzle. Oh my goodness.” He closes his eyes and inhales and, though I smell only Windex and lubricant, he’s face deep in that salty sweetness. He returns to me, still a bit dreamy eyed. “The thing’ll kill you, but you won’t mind.” He taps the flier. “Get there before 10 if you want any donuts.”

“Are you Big Frank?” I don’t mean for my disbelief to escape my brain and ride bareback on my words, but there it is, lassoing his lips, stretching his tight grin into a full open-mouthed smile.

“Used to be. More of a Medium Frank now. But stop by, grab a donut, talk to some of the regulars. Try out some options before you blow hundreds of bucks on something that’s not a good fit for you. If you want, I can give you the hand gun experience on the set.” 

My breath flutters, but he doesn’t acknowledge it. “What’s that like?”

“It switches back and forth. In one, you’re walking in a city, mugger pulls a gun. You step up, play the hero, catch two in the stomach, one in the chest. In another, you’re in a bar parking lot, you start some shit, attack someone, guy draws on you to defend himself. One through the neck.”

I frown, an air bubble lodging in my throat like a lead ball.

“Yeah, it’s ugly. After that one I woke up a few nights clawing for air. But that’s not even the worst one.” He props himself on his elbows, slides his fingers under his hat to massage his head. “In another, you’re sitting on a couch, some kind of family gathering. TV’s on, football game, kids are getting loud, fighting over Legos, a lady makes a joke about Lincoln Logs, and Pop! Pop! One kid’s on the ground and another’s holding the gun. Brutal shit. No one buys after that one. Takes at least two months before they work up the nerve to try again.”

“That makes me feel better.” He tilts his head. I don’t mean to confess publicly, but I go on. “I thought…I thought I was the only one who reacted that way.”

“Fuck no,” he laughs. “We have full medical, biological, emotional, and religious  experiences here. People passing out, puking, pissing, shitting, uncontrollable weeping—praying! Can’t tell you how many people found God on the other side of that VR set. No, no, no. You are not alone. Hang on a second.”

He walks to the sound system near the back office, lifts the arm off the record, and returns the vinyl to its sleeve. I didn’t realize the music had stopped. He brushes off a new record, sets the needle. The static gives way to upbeat strumming as he returns to the counter. 

I recognize the voice, but not this song about wildflowers. 

“Best part about Tuesday mornings—I control the music. About music, the wife, the kid, and I, we just don’t see eye to eye. So it goes.”

“I thought that was just a station.” Then I get it. “You chose those songs.”

He lays his hands palms up on the counter. “Disc one, side two of The Wall. Regulations don’t say anything about playing music during the simulation. It worked, though, right? Disc one, side two. That one’s been getting me through for half my life. You return to whatever works to get you through. Okay, let’s get you in the system and then send you on your way.” He reads off the waiver. “Your name’s Wesley Kincaid?”

“Wes.”

“Wes. You got it. Address?”

“Sixty-one seventy-one McKinley.”

“That near the highway?”

I nod.

“How old are you Wes?”

“Twenty-three.”

“You work? Go to school?”

“I work, part time, down at The Short 18.”

“The putt putt place?” He quits entering information and scratches his generous chin, unearthing something that makes him smile. “Mr. Beaman still run that place?”

I nod. 

“That was my first job, fishing balls out of the drink, swatting mosquitoes dead on my legs, slinging hot dogs.” He cups his hand over his mouth to catch a laugh. “We used to camouflage cans of Natty Ice, cover them with rocks and fishing net, on the 13th hole waterway so they’d stay cold throughout the day. Beaman never caught on. How do you like working there?” 

I’ve considered drowning myself in the unnatural blues of the 13th hole water trap. “It’s okay.”

“Just okay, huh?”

I borrow his lingo. “I also sling dogs and burgers and fish out balls, but most of the time I’m in the arcade. Keeping idiots in line. Doing minor repairs when games fizzle out. Beaman,” I choose my words carefully, “is conservative with his spending.”

“That’s funny,” Frank says, tapping more of my information into his laptop. “I always thought he was a cheap bastard. You any good with that stuff, the games and the tech?”

I shrug. “We haven’t had to retire any games since I’ve been there.”

He closes the laptop, bends like a teapot, short and stout, and reaches beneath the counter. He produces another form. An application. I scan the shop, looking among the camo jackets, gear, and accessories for the actual applicant or whoever else is in on the joke. “Don’t let the blissful calm of a Tuesday morning fool you. We get busy. You were here one Saturday—”

I open my mouth to deny or defend or curse him to hell, but he rolls on.

“Each time a new restriction’s added, before it’s enforced, we’re swarmed. Look,” he points to the back wall, to the exposed studs and uncut sheetrock leaned against them. “We’re building another simulation room. Fridays and Saturdays these young guys come in with no intent to buy. They just want the VR thrill. They pay the thirty bucks and take turns dying. Whatever, I’ll take their money, but they’re hogging the headset. And that’s not fair to my other customers. I need someone to watch them, to work with them, to, as you said, keep the idiots in line.”

The day’s trajectory confuses but doesn’t sadden me. 

“I don’t need an answer right now. Take the application home. Bring it with you Saturday, if you’re interested. What’s Beaman paying you?”

I look down and shake my head.

“Wes,” Frank extends his right hand. I accept it. “I think we could do better. Now go on, get out, unless you want to help Tom Petty and me put up some drywall.”

I kind of wouldn’t mind that, but I decline, folding the application into a square for my flannel’s breast pocket. Today’s a win, and right now I’m hungry, hankering for something good and rich and flavorful and deeply satisfying.

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