There was a gun that lived in the far corner of the top shelf along the back wall of your mom’s bedroom closet in a shoebox of course and it hadn’t been cleaned in years of course but it was always fully loaded and remained fully functional. You knew it was an emphatically bad idea to maintain a loaded weapon in a house with idiosyncratic domestic violence occurring on what seemed like a regularly scheduled basis, but you never had a say in the situation. Your mom hid it there because the presence of persistent violence in the home requires the means to protect oneself and a gun provided that means however old and janky that gun might be.

The gun originated with your granddaddy who was in the armed services when times were simpler, and guns were simpler, and your mom stashed it in her bedroom closet after he passed away, and she invited the first of many bad men into the home. You remembered reading somewhere that early childhood trauma can affect your rational decision-making abilities and you figured that sounded about right because you tended to make one bad adolescent decision after another and take wrong turn after wrong turn until you found yourself in a cruel cul-de-sac of despair surrounded by a constellation of no outlet signs. So, when you were confronted with someone who was older but not wiser who seemingly made the same staggering series of wrong turns and ended up in that same cul-de-sac fighting with you over who had the right-of-way you became irrationally compelled to do something drastic and desperate and possibly quite dumb. You felt powerless to stop this particular bad decision despite knowing this wrong turn could lead directly off a cliff with no way to jam the damn thing into reverse.

“Can you please turn the TV down? It’s right above my bed and I’m trying to sleep.”

You were standing at the bottom of the stairs explaining something you shouldn’t need to explain to your mom and John J. who were lounging on the living room couch above your basement bedroom watching some ridiculous religious programming at such a high volume it was making your eyelids twitch. You tried to stay calm and collected as you stared at John J., and he avoided eye contact while aiming the remote to adjust the sound down one single numeric value.

“Can you please turn it down a little more? I can’t sleep with that so loud.”

John J. had his crusty boot propped on a stool no one in the house had ever used to prop their foot which made him look like a cardboard cut-out character from a redneck review of rodeo rejects. He was a thick-headed man with a big-ass belt buckle who barely worked and watched TV all day and let your mom pay the bills and cook the meals while he treated your house like his natural born hamster nest despite him being there for only a few months. He was defiling your already pre-defiled home with a litter of cheap Coors Light cans and burnt burger farts and a gut that looked like he was about to give birth to something wretched at any possible moment.

“Can you please turn that damn thing down?”

“You better watch your mouth!”

John J. glared at you with veiny red eyeballs swimming piss-drunk in mercurial pools of four-point-two-percent alcohol by volume.

“Mom! Can you please turn that down? Jeezus.”

“Don’t you dare speak to my wife like that!”

John J. rose up with a puffed chest as if to intimidate you but began tottering unsteadily and appeared as though he was about to topple over face-first as soon as he achieved verticality. He wasn’t married to your mom. They’d only been dating a few months.

“It’s ok honey.”

Your mom was speaking to John J. and not to you.

“That’s not your wife. It’s my mom.”

“What did you say to me?”

“I said that’s not your wife. It’s my mom.”

“You better learn how to show some respect.”

You narrowed your eyes at John J. as he lumbered over to you like a plaid-shirted cowboy cosplayer with stiff limb syndrome and you stood firm with your feet flat on the floor and braced yourself as he hawked up a mouthful of phlegm and spit it directly into your face. Your mom shrieked in shock as you remained motionless with saliva slowly running down the bridge of your nose while John J. shambled back over to the couch and plopped himself down and re-propped his foot and took a gulp of warm beer as your mom rushed over to you. The fuse was lit, and the path was forged and there was nothing anyone could do to change it at that point.

“Are you ok honey?”

“No. I’m not. This is what’s happening right now.”

You made sure your mom had ample time to absorb the weight of the situation and take a mental picture so she could comprehend the irrevocable repercussions that would come next. You turned to face John J. as he pretended to ignore you while watching the TV pastor tell his listers that God Almighty’s law decreed that the man is the head of the household and don’t let them ever take that away or the ground will crumble and man will become beast and the devil will rule the earth. You wanted John J. to know that you were the devil now and that you had become a beast and that the ground would crumble when you took his head away. You retreated to your basement bedroom lair to begin plotting as you heard your mom issue a mildly frightened reprimand to the man who had just unwittingly handed his miserable fate to the moody teenager who felt like he had nothing to lose.

“Why don’t you just run away?”

Jace was your only friend in the neighborhood, and he never gave good advice.

“Where the hell would I go?”

“Anywhere you want.”

“But why should I leave? It’s my house.”

“He’ll leave eventually. They always do.”

“I dunno…”

“Well, I’m always here for you if you need me.”

A few days later Jace’s stepdad blew his brains out in the front doorway of their house and what was left of his family moved away and you never heard from him again. You never forget the sight of the yellow caution tape strung along the perimeter of their unmowed and unmanicured yard like a symbol of life itself whipping around wildly in the wind.

At the time you didn’t realize you had more than one option. The omens seemed obvious and inevitable. Your path felt predetermined, and the required route led down a road that ran directly into the deepest of darkest black holes from which not even the tiniest particle of positive outcomes could escape. So late one afternoon when the house was empty you snuck into your mom’s bedroom to find the gun in the shoebox in the far corner of the top shelf along the back wall of the closet. But before you could locate the deadly weapon your mom and John J. returned home to begin their early evening ritual of arguing and fighting against a soundtrack of swelling gospel music and pontificating televangelists and you ran down the back stairs and hid in your room and pretended no one was home.

John J. was at least two-and-a-half times your total body mass, but you knew that your absolute and comprehensive lack of fear was your most important advantage. After being knocked around throughout most of each important stage of your early childhood development you discovered that it produced a sort of numbness and that became your strongest asset by far. You considered yourself incredibly lucky because through some divine stroke of genetic luck your radically reduced sense of self-worth didn’t result in so much of an internalization of your anger and anxieties but an externalization of rage and resentment which was so much better because that meant you only wanted to harm others and not yourself. You figured that was probably how school shooters and mass murderers were made so you tried to carefully quarantine the worst impulses of your feelings and didn’t understand that the desire to harm others may be another form of self-harm.

You told yourself you weren’t a bad person because you were still capable of empathy and compassion and the only damage you wanted to inflict was on those you thought deserved it. You didn’t realize how empathy and compassion could be short-circuited and rewired as an unintended consequence of certain misplaced and maladaptive urges. You didn’t realize that you might enjoy the exhilaration of righteous anger because that was what helped you not to hurt.

But then something unexpected happened.

Later that same night when there was a brief break in the hostilities and you went upstairs in a rare moment of calm and found that sad sack of sorry potatoes sitting slumped unconscious on the couch you felt a peculiar sinking pity for the poor idiot. You instantly lost your nerve and decided you couldn’t possibly do the deed that night because he was too terribly pathetic and wounded looking laying there like an overgrown baby who’d probably never been loved. If you committed the sin right then and there, you’d just be the monster you needed him to be. You knew it would have to happen in a moment of pure heated passion or otherwise it would just be cold-blooded murder. It also occurred to you how deliberately you were meditating on not meditating on your premeditated plan.

You wanted to at least let John J. know he didn’t scare you or intimidate you so you stalked into the kitchen and rummaged around noisily in the silverware drawer and found a stubby steak knife and stuck it upright into the counter as a sign of caution as your mom’s voice wandered wearily from another room.

“There’s nothing left to eat honey but if you’re hungry there’s still some cheese popcorn left in the bag.”

You already knew that the refrigerator was bare, and the cupboard was bare, and the cabinet was bare but the industrial-sized plastic sack in the kitchen corner still had the rubble of the remaining popcorn kernels that you’d been subsisting on for the last few days. It was the one contribution that John J. made to the household from his five-day stint at a nearby food factory before being laid off for on-the-job inebriation and chronic lateness. Before he was summarily dismissed, he filled up a three-ply janitorial garbage bag with their finest highly processed popcorn product and brought it back to the homestead to supplement your basic lack of basic nutrition. It was flavored with flaky fake cheese stuff and in a different context it might have been a tasty treat but since it served as your only supper for days on end it became a mouthful of misery every time you force-fed yourself another fistful. Once or twice a week your mom would scrape together enough to conjure something that roughly resembled a home-cooked meal but you’d been mostly surviving strictly on cheese popcorn for the last four or five days and you couldn’t bear the thought of ingesting another morbid morsel so you guzzled a glass of water and plodded back downstairs to reconsider your plan.

The next day your mom’s former friend from her former church came over to pray for your home and pray for your mom and pray for you and pray for your happiness even though she didn’t have the slightest idea what the hell was going on there. She walked along the upstairs hallway with her holy hands outstretched like a faith healer for the haunted houses of firm believers and anointed each doorway with a greasy cross of olive oil. She stalked around the house scanning the contours of your humble home and raised her voice to a shout as she listed the litany of bad spirits that infested the property.

“Anger! Resentment! Sadness!”

When you reluctantly allowed her to enter your downstairs bedroom lair which was your one and only refuge, she reactively recoiled in horror as though she’d encountered the spawn of Satan himself. You rolled your eyes in exasperation as she searched the surfaces of your personal space with her sanctified x-ray vision and dared to declare it the most infested of them all.

“Oh dear Lord Jesus… I see… A spirit of rebelliousness! It’s so very strong!”

You wanted to yell in protest as she prayed piously with your mom and solemnly swayed back and forth with cupped hands like divinely tuned radar dishes that were homing in on the sinister source of everything that was wrong in your home.

“Father, we bless this place and cast out any unclean thing. Oh, dear Lord please cleanse this place of any foul wickedness.”

You wondered how this relative stranger could come in and crank around and pretend to understand the malicious machinations of a machine she’d never encountered before. She had no idea that this machine was a well-oiled vehicle that was lubricated with many long years of generational trauma, and it was running its callous course just like it had for ages and no amount of prayers or pompous pleas would change its preordained direction.

“Why don’t you just tell him to leave?”

“What?”

“Why don’t you just tell him to leave?”

Your mom and her former friend from her former church looked at you like you’d spoken to them in a foreign tongue as they stuttered and stammered like they were spiritually glitching. Your mom’s former friend from her former church then began screaming at the top of her lungs like it was the only thing that made sense.

“LORD GOD PLEASE CLEANSE THIS PLACE IN YOUR NAME OH LORD!”

“Jeezus goddamn christ! Just tell him to leave or I’ll do it myself!”

You stormed out of the house with fireworks shooting out of your ears and lava in your footsteps. You knew that your mom was attempting to pave over her own series of bad decisions and wrong turns with scriptures and sermons instead of facing the actual facts on the ground and the real road ahead. She was now hurtling hell bound off an embankment with her son strapped struggling helplessly in the passenger seat and you were determined to free yourself and jump clear and do something that was drastic and desperate and possibly quite dumb.

You hopped on your beat-up bike and furiously pedaled around block after neighborhood block to burn off your excess fumes when you saw the unmistakable silhouette of John J. ambling down the street with a crutch hitched under one arm and a six-pack tucked under the other. There was a lumpy cast on his left leg, and you wondered what the hell happened to him as you were seized with the idea that this might be your golden moment of opportunity. You had a split-second vision of rushing home and stealing your mom’s car keys and revving back down the road and violently swerving to swipe John J. into oblivion and then returning home before anyone knew what happened. It was a time before the era of peer-to-peer video surveillance, and your neighbors all kept to themselves and didn’t ask questions, so you figured it was the perfect plan.

But as you casually rolled past John J. on the opposite side of the street, he never lifted his head, and he seemed entirely exhausted and confused as he wobbled and toddled and the six-pack slipped from his grip and burst on the ground in a geyser of sputtering suds. As he feebly bent to salvage the remaining undamaged cans you realized you’d never seen someone so goddamn broken in all your life. You couldn’t possibly bring yourself to run his ass over in that pitiful state because it would have been like running over already rotten roadkill. You just wanted him to leave like they always do.

Later that evening when the familiar echo of anger and hostilities filtered down through the dirty vent in your ceiling it felt like a cruel joke that stopped being funny a long time ago. You were desperately hoping for a reprieve in the conflict due to the compromised condition of John J. and his crippled leg but when you heard the distinctive sound of a body being slammed against the wall the fizzled fuse was rekindled, and you searched your room for a blunt object for bludgeoning or sharp instrument for stabbing.

You snatched a pair of sewing scissors from a junk drawer and stomped up the stairs and immediately encountered your mom standing in the foyer holding the gun from the shoebox and trembling like she was about to fall apart. A flow of tears streamed down her reddened face as you searched for any sign of John J. but saw only a partly open front door and flipped over welcome mat as your mom gazed glass-eyed into the distance.

“What happened? Where is he?”

“God saved us honey.”

“What?”

“The Lord saved us.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I pointed the gun at him and told him to stop. But he wouldn’t stop. So I pulled the trigger. And it clicked. He fell to his knees. Because he knew I shot him. But God saved us. Because it didn’t go off. He crawled out on his hands and knees. He’s not coming back.”

You stared out the door into the startling silence of the moonless night and shut the door and shut your feelings and told your mom to put the gun away. She cried herself to sleep in the living room recliner as you sat in numbness and realized how long it had been since your house was that quiet. You then went downstairs and opened the top drawer of your dresser and pulled out six pieces of copper-covered lead and rattled them around in your fist and their heft felt a hundred times heavier than their actual weight.

The previous night when you retrieved the gun from the shoebox in the far corner of the top shelf along the back wall of your mom’s bedroom closet while your mom and John J. were crashed out cold on the couch you made a last-minute decision that you decided may have been your best decision. As you held your granddaddy’s pistol alone in the dark you felt the intense mass of its burden, and you saw yourself standing at a fork in the road and the many branching paths stretching out ahead of you. You thought about how life is not a straight line but a series of twists and turns and climbs and plummets and crossroads and detours and if you’re not careful you could end up straight off the edge and forever in a ditch. So you took the bullets out of the gun as insurance against an irreversible incident that you knew no one could ever return from. You understood it was your chance to make a choice that could eventually arrive you at a different destination and allow you another option to change your route and avoid the edge and avoid the plummet and avoid the seemingly obvious and inevitable and allow you to do something that you might not otherwise have done to land you in a much better and much safer place than you might have otherwise expected.