I think, This is just what I need—for Sawyer to be panicked. I should fight back now, while he can’t manage. But somewhere less obvious . . .

Fuck, fuck, fuck, he thinks, so loudly he doesn’t even hear my thoughts in our head.

He throws the door open and pulls us free from the house. A window explodes behind us, its glass shattering in bits along the porch as we stumble down the steps, across the lawn, gasping in the clean air.

Two ghouls pass us, going the opposite direction, likely drawn to the smell of Rod’s rotting flesh. They phase through the walls of Rod’s house as its wood is eaten alive.

Sawyer

when sawyer was twelve he played in his room with a doll named maxxy

she sat in a chair in the corner of gramma’s house

sawyer asked if he could take it home and gramma said yes without a question

just wanted to make her grandson smile

he braided maxxy’s black hair

and sat her in the closet and made her look beautiful

then one day she disappeared

come outside, bill said, i want you to see something

and there maxxy was again but not maxxy anymore— just a dead thing

burning in the fire pit out back

her hair roasting so the forest smelled of melting plastic and boy’s tears

sawyer cried and bill and rod laughed together, toasting their beer in joy

loving every minute of it

these are for girls, bill said

no more hanging out at gramma’s, rod said

and both laughed and mocked sawyer

now sawyer plays with guns and sets dolls on fire

now sawyer can’t stand to feel on fire

Momma was the first one to teach me how to hold it on a lazy late afternoon in the third grade, when I was lying on my bed, watching a spider crawl up the sunbaked wall, thinking about nothing.

She knocked and came in. “Hey, Sawyer? Come here real fast. I wanna show you something.”

We went out back, and Momma loaded up a cylinder.

“I’m telling Annie the same thing. If I’m not here and you see somebody strange out here you don’t know, trying to get inside? You have my permission to shoot them. It’s your Second Amendment right. It’s self-defense.”

The wind tickled the strands of blond hair around her ear as she squinted and then shot at a tree. I watched the bark explode as smoke trailed up from the barrel. Then she made me do it.

She put Bill up to teaching me to shoot a second time, age twelve. We shot at targets at an indoor shooting place. I flinched every time a bang exploded from my hands. The side of my face started simmering. A hot shell had bounced out the back of the gun and wedged between my glasses and face. I jumped out of the booth.