With BB Guns

Somewhere along a salt marsh way beyond the sage brush, lives a wild pack of rescued greyhounds.

If I just get on a kick I have to go with it. Sitting, walking, sitting. You never know when you’ll get another chance at this kind of momentum.

Like right now I’m watching an airplane go by dragging a banner against the flat blue sky. It circles, it seems, around me—me being the center of that circle. Something is circling me suspiciously and now, on 2 different levels, I find I’m in the middle of an investigation. Was this all for me? Are these paranoid thoughts yet? What does it mean when a P.I. is self employed? I want to say that they investigate themselves but part of me knows that’s wrong. Though I’m in the middle of an investigation, I’m no PI.

And is it heavy handed to say that this is a self-investigation?

Yeah. It is.

The thought makes me shift uncomfortably, like the impossibility of remaining calm when a bee lands on my neck, or knowing that the neighbor kids are setting up a perimeter in the brush with BB guns.

I’m writing this while watching the Superbowl and it feels wrong. I’m not sure if it’s the Superbowl or if it’s writing this.

Have I forgotten or lost the way?

I think about the little tiny bag that used to be in the drawer.

The french-pointer is shedding on the deck instead. Every few seconds he thinks he sees something. Maybe he does and I see nothing. The way an old pool liner looks like light in water through ripples in lit up water rippling and run through with light. And still, I think I see nothing.

I think about Lovelady, Texas or Blessing, Texas or Kermit or Cool or Cloverleaf, Texas. What happens in a place like Cool, Texas that doesn’t happen here?

And I think, either way, on the nights we ended days perfectly, we numbered them too.

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Nathan Dragon’s story collection, The Champ Is Here, is available from Cash 4 Gold.