The night that she sat with a shotgun barrel in her mouth, the sky outside was a
pinkish-grey — ashes-of-roses, she remembered. She licked her tongue around the shotgun
barrel, idly, flexing her fingertips; she wondered how she got here.
This is a story that is both true and a lie.
She sat cross-legged on the bed, chin resting on her left palm; she sits in the same position
today. Her face is impassive but her eyes flicker from surface to surface: blank walls and floors,
lingering on the window.
She considers the weight of the gun and she tries to decide what she feels; she has resolved
herself into small compartments of sensations. She rubs her cheek against the shotgun barrel,
briefly, like a kitten, then presses it across her lips, embarrassed.
The first night that she sat with a shotgun barrel in her mouth, the sky was not a pinkish-grey.
She remembers it clearly: it was late autumn but hot and the ocean keened in the distance. She
was cross-legged and her chin rested on her left hand, but there was not a shotgun in her hand;
there has never been a gun in her hand. Again, this story is both true and a lie.
Let me start over.
There was a night when she sat cross-legged on the bed with her chin in her hand when the sky
was a pinkish-grey. She watched the precision of the trees through the window, the formality of their
silhouettes. She felt the weight of the shotgun in her hand, then pressed her thumb against her
lips, embarrassed.
She sits cross-legged on her bed and she watches the color of the sky. Sometimes it settles itself
into a color that she can put words to, and she straightens her back and her eyes focus, she forgets
about the weight in her hand. She clutches at the blue and the grey and the brilliant orange and yellow,
and she presses her fingers to the soft silencing black; the colors fade like liquid, her chin falling into
her left hand.
He told her, that late autumn, how to sleep, how to dream, how to feel the weight of the shotgun in her
hand. He closed his fingers around her empty palm; she looked up at him, impassive.
This story is true and a lie but the color of the sky is undeniable. It might have been that pinkish-grey
and it might have been an unsettling blue and it might have been a quiet, enveloping black, but there
is a girl there still: her eyes flicker through the window; she wraps her arms around her knees, scraping
at the weight in her palm.