We stole a gun from the safe and went out to the fields, where the moon lay like a serrated wound on the face of the night sky, and pointed the boom end at cows. Dumb sentinels of pastures overgrazed and nearing depletion. They sat on all fours like a scarecrow pushed over. My buddy held them in his sight for a long time, slowly breathing through his whole body, his skin a membrane he’d been trying to shirk off, and he said to me, almost a whisper, bang.

But that wasn’t good enough for me. When I got big I would go out to bars and sit in the corner and stare out at the shifting forms, men and women in all different kinds of couplings looped together, blended into the same silhouette, and I would try and project my own face onto theirs. When they would kiss each other, I would rub my lips together until the scraps of dry skin grew curled and fell off. I started to buy knives. I’d stay in parking lots of businesses I had no reason to enter late into the night, running the blade against the hem of my pocket until it unraveled into thread. One night I did manage to work myself up and I lodged a knife in a car’s tires, and when I got home, I rewarded myself by taking a full gulp from my father’s whiskey. My chest felt hot and dry, like an atom bomb went and wiped away all the oxygen in the room. I thought of calling paramedics, I thought the feeling itself might kill me, but it subsided, and I put the bottle back on the shelf.

The time came to leave because in that town all walls started to feel more like cells. I saw a lot of what this world, or at least this country, has to offer, and the mountains only got taller as I moved west, and as the darkness of night grew longer so too did the days grow brighter, sun thrown from every particle of snow coating every mountain top, and it was beautiful, but I felt this plaque on my soul that no image could reach. I thought to myself, well, if only they could talk to me.

But the road was open and the country pregnant with opportunity. I made money, lived out of a car, met people who slid off me like dead skin cells sloughed off in a tossing night. I met a woman who made things better for a time. Her voice was like the wind that passed through the boards back home, and her body a night light catching the moon off the sweat collecting on her. When she left, she left the kid behind too, a small, mewling creature who, I came to realize, had stolen some of my own features off my face.

One night, all those years ago, in the field, my buddy pulled the trigger. All at once the night was shattered and the vacuum of reality hung about us, the two of us, stapled to the tall grains of grass we had smushed into a makeshift pillow. How much time elapsed before we made ourselves move? We stood, we crawled over to the field, where the herd perched with necks raised, dumb, shining eyes staring off in all directions, this the last remnants of their survival instincts. But they made no notice of our approach. They were a hundred feet out and we saw no sign of a wounded beast, so we turned and fled back to our different rooms. But the sound still hung around us. A mechanical moan as some integral thing faltered and folded. That dirty bomb in my buddy’s hand cried orange and red into the violet womb encompassing us, reverberating, as months chased years.

Sometimes, I think I can’t hear it anymore. Sometimes I even think it’s gone.

– Jacob Brown