“I don’t know, maybe.” I put the noc’s back in the case. “How many things got a velvet case.” I say. My brother knows I am not asking him. That I was just saying it even though I was saying it like I really wanted to know, like I expected an answer. He knew I was musing. We lost the latch to it from before. The straps were still good. He could just slide the nocs in and close the lid and forget about it, not neglectfully but just not worry that something else needed to be done. I try and wrap the straps around the case so the lid is held closed in that all-to-my-own half assedness that has become some great and personal hallmark of my own failure, he would say. Not out loud but later when he journald. tried to explain to him one night that it wasn’t the lid being closed that bugged me but the fact that the case wouldn’t sit evenly with the straps wrapped around them that way. He asked me why I needed to do anything with the straps.
Once we got settled. Once we sat long enough to know we weren’t going anywhere, anywhere real, like the coast let’s say, once that happened, we would just sit with our feet up, leanin back, right at the tipping spot you know, where your about ready to go over backwards, then we’d just lay our feet so, to keep us from doin so, and just sit for hours. It’s not a thing that’s taught, sitting like that. It’s a thing you seek out yourself. We’d do it for hours like I said. We never sat like that from before. I think mostly I was the one always ready to get going. I can see why now that it may have made him nervous. You never want someone that you love to go.
He picks the case up and shakes it around in a circle, whipping the strap to unwind then sets the case down, lifts the lid and pulls the nocs back out.
“Are you looking at the same thing I’m looking at?” this question was for real.
“By that white chimney looking thing right?” I tell him, but he is still trying to find it again. I lift my rifle up and try to balance it with my knee and elbow. It doesn’t work, it never does. I get down and crawl to the sand bags, those were my ideas too. Those sandbags saved our lives. If I could go back, if it all could, there would be so much I would do with sandbags.
I settle in on it. It’s a piece of a wall. I try to place it, to remember it from before, but I can’t. I know where it is I just can’t remember seeing it specifically.
“Your blind.” He tells me. It’s hard to spot at night but its one of those bright ass moons that cast shadows.
“There’s brown brick to the left of it. Not cinderblock but those weird long brown bricks, the ones that are bigger and thicker than the red ones, you know the famous red bricks the little fuckers. That’s like just to the left touching that white chimney thing.” I feel my mouth doing that snarl that I do when I am sighting with one eye. Really, fuck the guy who made the scope, it’s so unnaturally positioned.
“You don’t see that?”
“See what, a girl?”
“Yes, a girl. Right there.” And as soon as he says it, its like I just saw the design in those blurry smeared design pictures with all the colors, you know the ones, the ones you have to look at and do something weird with your eyes to see them, but when you try it just makes it harder and everyone comes up just totally not believing you can’t see it as much as you disbelieve that they can, and they say, just relax your eyes. How the fuck do you relax your eyes. Anyway, when he said that, when he said, right there, I saw her.
“What in the fuck is she doing in the street.” I say. We both stiffen. Its not a question, and my brother, again, realizes it and says nothing.
“Have we gone fucking crazy? Have we been up here shooting fucking people cuz were bat shit fucking crazy!?” I yell at him never taking the rifle and scope from my face. I believe it, for a moment, that we are psycopaths, that the days and the smell of shit, that the neigbors and the dead all just wished us willfully away, missed the smoke, the shouting, that the cops just never came up our drive, that somehow all the dead were explained through some other means or occurances, that we didn’t have to be up here, but how could we fucking come down now, after all we did?
“Op, she’s gone.”
“What?” I say jerking back to the scope. It hits that real sensitive skin around my eyebrow and I struggle, chasing that fog girdled circle of rambunctious clarity in the barrel of my scope, but I never caught her again.
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