Mark Falkin - The Late Bloomer

Though frightened to have this gun pointed at me by my friend whose eyes held such terror and pain in them I cannot even begin to describe it, though to do so is the writer’s want, I felt impervious—calm, even. If bullets came, they’d miss. But I knew they wouldn’t come because I had an idea.

“You have to let me do this,” said Bass. He sounded exhausted now. Ready.

“Okay.”

“Please just go away and let me do this. Then it’ll all be over.”

“Okay. But can you go outside?”

Bastian’s face fell downcast, turned confused.

It was working. I wanted to get him thinking about it, to derail him. Though the white stuff seemed to be unstoppable, I wasn’t convinced the suicides were. It takes an intentional act to do it. I figured if I could disrupt Bass, get him thinking about something else, he could find a way to beat it back. I chose to act uncaring, resigned. I wasn’t, but that was my gut instinct: throw him off by doing something counterintuitive.

Bass lowered the gun and placed it back flat on his chest. Thoughts whirring through his mind’s infinite passages. I stood sick with fear, hoping that my friend in his last despairing moment wouldn’t feel I’d abandoned him.

Kodie nudged me in the kidney. “Kevin, what are you saying?” I counted on Bass hearing her and me not answering. I stood more erect and took in a deep breath to punctuate the fact that I meant business. I mustered a look that said go ahead, leave us, coward .

On his face hung disbelief and hurt. As long as he felt something, he had a shot, as we all did, as long as we didn’t go numb.

“Wait. What? You want me to go outside to…?”

“That’s right. I can’t stop you, but could you just step outside to do it?”

“I can’t believe you.”

“What can it possibly matter to you? You’re leaving us behind. So what does it matter where you do it? It doesn’t.” Brief pause, pregnant as hell. “But if it does matter, then things matter to you, and if things matter to you, then life matters. Being alive matters.”

Bastian held the gun in his hands like it was an alighted butterfly. He regarded it as an artifact of his past rather than a tool of his shortened future.

He considered. This is what mattered. With consideration, there is hope.

The three of us stood there breathing, our hearts beating, the moment turning back on itself over and over, not stretching forward into the next.

He dropped his hands to his sides and began crying. The gun was still tight in his grip and he beat it against his hip.

“Give it to me, Bastian. Okay? I’m going to step over there and you’re going to give it to me, all right? Slowly.”

As I took my first step toward him, the house went dark, as if the thickest of clouds swam before the sun. Eclipse dark. Just as quickly, that darkness lifted, and through the kitchen window I saw the massive shadow move along the garage, a neighbor’s roof and then gone. There was this final flapping flick to it.

The house light again, Kodie screamed into my ear. Bass pivoted toward us, his eyes expanded and shining. He lifted the gun, aimed, and fired.

I had closed my eyes. It happened so quickly, the shadow, her scream, his turning to us, I didn’t react. Maybe it’s because I thought I knew the bullet would miss.

I heard glass shatter and felt a burst of air. When I opened my eyes, I saw a broken front door. Jagged shards of wood, glass daggers. On the porch lay a kid, clutching a sucking chest wound weltering through his fingers. He struggled and cried out, inhaled and exhaled rapidly for a few seconds, then went slack, the last movement belonging to his blue tennis shoes.

“Oh—” uttered Bass. Though he had just shot a little kid to death, it had kept him from doing it to himself. That he cared he’d done it ratified his will to live. He dropped the gun to the floor. “Goddammit. I… I just reacted. He just appeared. Looking in. I don’t even know how to say what his face looked like. It was all… moving. His face wasn’t still.”

I snatched the gun from the floor and took a step away from him. “It’s all right, Bass, okay?”

He blinked at me like someone awakening from a dream. Looked at Kodie, down at his nakedness. He immediately covered himself. He brought his knees together and hunkered. “Man… what the hell? What was I…?”

“You beat it, Bass,” I said. “You beat back what millions upon millions couldn’t.” Like I thought I had beat it back at McBride’s Guns. I think late bloomers have the ability to beat it all back. Adults didn’t and got overwhelmed with it. All conjecture, of course.

“You did it. You saved me, Kevin.” When he said that, I specifically remember a wave of electricity coursing through me, numbing my hair, tweaking my pinky toe.

I stammered, “I just reacted. I thought you were going to take us out. Are you…?”

“Okay?” he asked, a look of amazement on his face. “Yeah. I feel great. I mean, oh my God I feel like something’s literally been lifted off of me, a weighty fog. I can’t believe I was about to…” He shuddered.

I flicked the gun halfheartedly at him. “Can you maybe get away from the rest of the weapons there and put your clothes back on?”

“Sure.” His voice trailed away as he stared at the kid on the porch. “But I don’t know where they are just now.”

“Let’s go look,” I said. “You don’t mind if I keep this thing on you for a few minutes until I’m sure you’re cool?”

“Whatever makes you feel better. But I swear,” and he chuckled here, “I’m not ever going to get in that… place again. I can’t explain it. It’s gone, and it won’t come back. Thanks to you.”

I believed Bastian. Mouths might, but faces don’t lie. He had defeated the feeling, whether it was with my help or not I’m not sure. The way he treated me thereafter, you’d’ve thought I’d taken the bullet myself and then risen three days later wearing a muslin robe and sandals.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I gambled and won, that’s all. Fifty-fifty shot. You can’t tell someone that, shrug your shoulders and say yeah, well, I got lucky and so did you. Someone’s very life is worth more than that, the result of a coin toss. You want to believe that, anyway.

His face and demeanor changed. He became the positive one. Convincing us things would get better.

Something strange happening. He had this, what was it? A reverence for me. I’d catch him looking at me all starry-eyed. He was agreeable to anything I said and very solicitous. If I was bending down to lift something, he’d say, let me . Sometimes he’d look at me with his lips parted and all walleyed staring, like a dog looks at you when you’ve got too much of a meat sandwich on your hands.

Maybe I did save him. It was lucky.

Grandma Lucille. Well, you know what she’d say about that. Instead of saying ‘There are no coincidences, Kevin,’ she’d just as likely say, ‘There’s no such thing as luck.’ Same thing.

Whatever it was, there was a dead kid on our porch. The kid wouldn’t be dead if I’d managed to get Bastian outside or if he’d just shot himself.

I think the kid was there to report on events. That one of the last of us was about to go. I think he was a messenger, an errand boy.

The dead kid wasn’t one of the kids who were standing in the neighbor’s yard. This boy had darker, shorter hair and he was younger. He’s maybe eight, nine. I didn’t know what to make of Bastian’s claim that the kid’s face wasn’t still. His words. In flux he also said of the kid’s face later, looking at me as we sat at the table eating cereal, looking at me in that… way.