THE PRECISION KILL by James Miranda
They gave us the blowguns to shut us up. It was obvious. My brother and I, we’d begged for things like this before – b. b. guns, brass knuckles, the serrated hunting knife with the spinning marine compass and snake bite kit screwed into the hilt – but this was the first time they’d ever given in.
“No fighting for a week and then we’ll see,” my mother said.
We had to go back and check the advertisement to see if we’d missed something. But there it was, hidden in the back of Wolf Blood: Feral Screams, Issue # 76: The Precision Kill 36" .40 Caliber Black Blowgun, complete with twelve sharp-wire darts, a sixteen dart quiver, anti-inhale safety mouthpiece, anodized aluminum barrel and foam hand grip. It was capable of firing a dart at up to 350 feet per second. No mention of plastic tips or barrels soldered shut. We’d been fooled by the fine print before. Guns turned out to be cigarette lighters. Samurai swords had edges like the safety scissors kindergartners used to cut their construction paper angels.
That whole week we barely talked to each other, figuring it was the only way to avoid issues of semantics when it came to our mother’s definition of a fight. She didn’t make it easy though. On Tuesday, she switched our lunchboxes on purpose, giving my brother T-Rex and me Jo-Jo the lovable caterpillar. She watched from the kitchen window while we stood for the bus. I waited until we were safely aboard before socking him in the arm and setting things straight. On Wednesday she made us separate dinners: mac and cheese with sliced hot dogs for him, rice and black beans for me.
Though my little brother, with his fine blond hair and baby blues, looked the picture of peace and piety – we’re talking about the same kid who, when once asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, answered “a piano” – I knew the violence he dreamt up at night. We’d seen a slit throat once on television referred to as a happy face and for weeks he went around mimicking the maneuver on Sam, our fourteen-year-old golden retriever.
I knew he wanted this even more than I did.
The day the package arrived from Sure Tech, my mother and father sat us down and looked to the backs of our eyes.
“Now remember,” my mother said, waving her finger in our faces, “you can only use these when your father and I are watching.”
We assembled the tubes and attached the quivers, the glint off the black lacquered barrels flashing in our eyes. Spent that entire afternoon shooting at a watermelon in the back yard while our parents watched from lawn chairs and sipped iced tea.
It wasn’t exactly what we’d hoped for.
One afternoon though, while our mother was at the supermarket, we found where she had been hiding the guns in her underwear drawer and chased each other around the house perfecting the art of the near miss. Ducking behind the frame of the bathroom door, my brother finally caught me in the left shoulder with a thwmmp. He let out an almost inaudible oh when I plucked the small dart from my flesh. We thrilled at the possibility of real blood.
James Miranda’s fiction has appeared in Third Coast and PIF Magazine. This is his first nonfiction publication a national literary magazine.