The Family Across the Street by Nicole Trope

47

Physical pain is a strange thing. It concentrates the mind. It sharpens your senses. I can smell the honeysuckle from outside, overripe in the heat. I can feel the heavy hot air in the room. I can hear sirens. I drop the gun because my hand doesn’t seem able to hold it anymore. It falls onto the floor with a clunk. And my body slowly folds, sinking onto the carpet.

I was going to shoot myself in the head, straight into my tortured brain. She could have just done it for me. I don’t know why she aimed for my stomach instead of my head.

‘Get down on the ground,’ says the policewoman. I am already down on the ground. Her voice is trembling a little and I wonder if I’m the first person she’s ever shot.

I came to punish her, and then I was going to punish him. It’s her fault Maddy didn’t love the man I was. And it’s Logan’s fault that she broke up with me. But I don’t know if I meant to… kill anyone.

I turn my head to the side and I see yellow camels. Why are there yellow camels? There was a rug in our house, and later in the flat my mother and I lived in, that had yellow camels. I used to count them sometimes, imagine them all walking across the desert in a slow bumping row. I look up and blink slowly, watching a small fly walk across the white ceiling. I turn my head and I can see my mother’s legs sprawled over the sofa.

She used to sing to me when she woke me up in the morning, and the song goes round my head now. ‘Good morning, good morning, it’s early morning light, so I want to say good morning to you.’ She put notes in my lunchbox when I was little: ‘Have a good day, I love you’ with a smiley face. She made me macaroni and cheese when I asked for it, even if she needed to go out and get the ingredients. She read me stories at night in bed, books about places that didn’t exist where animals could speak. She held me when I woke from a bad dream, telling me that the monsters had no chance against her. She wanted me to grow up to be a good person, a good man, but she didn’t have a chance against everything he said to me, everything he told me. She would have forgiven me anything. As I struggle to breathe, I acknowledge that truth. She would have forgiven me anything and welcomed me back into her life. I was going to break in through the back door but then I decided to ring the bell in the front, just stood there and waited. I saw some of my own features in her little boy’s face but that just made me angrier.

Her expression as she saw me at her front door only hours ago is imprinted on my mind. She was filled with delight and she even opened her arms, ready and waiting for a hug. She opened her arms and I showed her the gun. I could have made a different choice. I could have stepped into those arms and changed my life.

There is a burnt metal smell in this room. A thick, dark smell of blood and fire. There is a scent of sweat and honeysuckle. My eyes are heavy and I can’t quite breathe in enough air. I try to take a breath and hear a gurgle in my throat, taste something hot and salty. Am I dying?

I think she was a good mother. Maybe I was just a bad kid with a bad father. I don’t hate her. I love her, and now she’s gone.

I don’t know why I was so angry.

I don’t know why I came here.

I don’t know anything.