Shooting blanks

The gun was small, a revolver, with the normal six-bullet capacity. It seemed old and worn, the silver tarnished and scratched, but well cared for. For a moment my eye was on this tarnished firearm, and I speculated on whether it was a standard death-inducing weapon or a specialized gun meant for the purpose it was now being put to. Then my eyes fell on the small silver bullets, glinting wickedly under the sun, shiny and new, each roughly the size of my thumbnail.

"Is that a real gun?"

For a moment he continued cleaning the gun slowly, wiping it down carefully, and I wondered if he didn't hear me and at the same time realized he couldn't have not because we were too near together to pretend we couldn't hear each other. I briefly experienced the devastating humiliation of being pointedly ignored before he turned and looked at me with an odd, almost stern expression on his face, as if reproving me for asking such a question. He spoke very slowly, carefully enunciating each word. He didn't answer me directly, simply asking, "Does it look like a real gun to you?" 


"I don't know," I answered back just as simply. "I've never seen a real gun before."

His face twisted briefly, almost into an expression of amusement, before he turned back to his work. It was very curious: he was not ignoring me out of spite or malice, but seemed rather to be patiently enduring me as if I were a curious child. He said nothing else, but opened the part of the gun where bullets were inserted before wiping it meticulously with a cloth. I waited just as patiently for an answer that did not seem to be forthcoming. My eyes lingered again on the bullets. Blank, they must be, but I wished I could pick them up and examine them closely, to gauge their weigh and contents more accurately.

Silently, he began loading the gun, sliding each bullet home and rotating the barrel with a series of clicks to insert the rest of them.

A passer by known to me inquired humorously, "Why are you looking so closely? Do you want to buy one?" He laughed.

My name was called. I turned away and left the man and his gun.

After showers

It smells like rain now, a clean, metallic smell that I find pleasantly soporific. The rain itself is constant and soothing, a calm counterpoint. The heavier the rain gets the happier I am, for when the wind screams and the waters lash ceaselessly and pound against the walls in its rage, the safer I am in this room, my cocoon, alone in quiet.

(And of course after the rain everything is cool and washed clean, and it is almost a new world outside, wet and damp and shiny and glorious. Just as when you left the womb and everything was fluid, so it is after the showers.)

The creation of a box

There is nothing more beautiful than work done with the hands. Whenever I walk in street markets it is almost saddening to see all these items duplicated so carefully to look like the effect of human hands, but no imitation is as perfect as the imperfection. As a child I had a particular affinity for items of wood; items of metal were easily worked in factories and easily mass-produced, I knew, but I had thought that the warm, chiseled curves of a varnished wooden jewelry box could be made by none other than the careful grace of real hands. When I grew up and found the disillusionment under which I was being kept, I never again bought those pretty trifles and made things of my own. I wanted to construct a box as beautiful as those I had seen as a child but this time with my own hands, and I would know all the care and patience, the details and inaccuracies of it.

I soon found that not all wood was equal; I dabbled in ordinary woodwork with the hammer and saw, diverged into carving with the chisels, discovered the aesthetics and practicalities. I knew hinges connected wood, but I saw that grooves had to be made. When you are a young girl working with a penknife and tiny one-inch hinges a groove is a formidable thing to create precisely. Instantly I saw my tools were not fit for my ideas, but I ploughed on nonetheless. I experimented with other materials and embellishments, but I found all of them inferior to my needs. Only wood, solid and strong, yet malleable and yielding to the patient touch, seemed to satisfy me. Once, in an experiment with alternative materials, I took Coke tins and cut off the tops and bottoms, before flattening them into squares and then carefully folding them into squares to be painstakingly molded over an MDF board with tiny gold screws. The work was laborious and the product, despite being made with arguably more expensive materials, not as beautiful as I hoped it would be. So I went back to wood. I wanted something complex and beautiful that would soothe down the edges of my nerves, something patient to fill the longings of a child for a pretty box. Did I tell you about how much I wanted the first wooden box I saw? I thought it was quite the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. But only many years later I told my father, and he took me to the shop, and of course by then it was quite long gone and all I had left was a vague longing for that beautiful obscure object. Like all things we only have in our imagination, it seemed very beautiful to me then and it still is, now.

I soon constructed a small wooden box entirely without nails, made of lengths of wood carefully cut and tirelessly sanded smooth so that they would fit almost perfectly into each other like a puzzle. For my purpose I only had inferior light wood, a pale grainy beige, the cheapest that could almost be regarded as only fit for being burnt; but when the last piece fit into place I saw that it was far from perfect but still beautiful after all.