**At the sound of your approach, I look up from my typewriter and remove the oversized tortoiseshell glasses from my eyes, allowing them to hang on the pale lilac string which holds them around my neck.**
Oh, hello there!
So nice to see you.
I’m glad you came, I wanted to tell you something.
I’ve decided that for the next couple of weeks, Stories From Nowhere is going to take a break, while I go back to the children’s book I’m about 25000 words into but have long neglected, and see if I can push it along a bit.
I’ll send you a few stories from the archive in the meantime, and maybe a little something new from the stack of half-finished stories if I can make the time.
Yes, you can have a cookie. But now go, I have to get writing.
See you soon x
The rifle
“You’re a bloody brilliant shot,” said my father. “Are you’ve never shot a rifle before?”
That’s a stupid question, I wanted to say. Of course I haven’t. I hate rifles. I hate guns and shooting and killing and all of it.
“No,” I said. “Never.”
“You’re a natural,” he smiled. “A natural.”
He had been aching to bring me out since he had first seen me with the gun. I don’t know why I had picked the damned thing up in the first place. I wonder if I had some kind of sense that it was something I’d be good at. I was certainly no good at football or cricket.
I have no idea of what my father did for a living. He was often away for long periods, during which my mother rarely spoke of him and seemed to focus mainly on getting by. She never said where he was on the rare occasion that I thought to ask she gave only vague answers, like “He’s working,” or “He’s away.” When he was back, we had little or no common ground to stand on. He certainly wasn’t interested in books or drawing like I was.
When I was much younger he had bought me a football for my birthday. We spent a miserable afternoon in the field behind the house, him kicking the ball over and over, me chasing around trying to kick it back, missing, and falling over in the mud. At first, I think he was enjoying himself, living out his dream of a father-son relationship, but soon it became obvious I had no ability and when, finally, the ball hit me in the face and I began to cry, he turned into the surly, distant man I had known ever since.
Maybe that was why I picked up the rifle.
He had been cleaning it in the garden. I had set up a feeder by my bedroom window so that I could watch the birds while I read. When I went out to put some breadcrumbs down, the rifle was lying on some pieces of newspaper, with a bottle of oil and a greasy rag. I picked it up out of curiosity. I’d never seen it around the house before. I set the butt in the crook of my shoulder like I had seen people do on the TV. I raised the barrel and looked along it, up into the sky. I would no more have fired it than eaten it, I was just curious, but my father must have seen me and rushed out.
“Do you want to give it a go?” he said.
Since then he’d spoken of nothing else but how, when the rain stopped we would go out ‘on an expedition’ and ‘pot a few rabbits’.
And it turned out that I did have an aptitude for it. My father took me out to a place he knew, and we had lain in the grass for an hour or so, until the rabbits began to pop out and sit there, stupidly nibbling the grass while my father loaded the gun and put it in my hands.
“Now then,” he has whispered. “Just like you did in the garden. Look out along the barrel, through the sight there, and when you’ve got one all lined up, you just pull the trigger.
I did as he said. I sighted the rabbit, and squeezed the trigger. It felt like a game. The rifle snapped and jerked, the rabbits ran in all directions and my father leaped up into the air. “That’s it!” he cried. “You got one! First time!” He ran over to where the rabbit had been and lifted up a limp pile of fur. He danced from foot to foot to show me how pleased he was. “Well done! You did it!”
I lay in the grass, breathing hard, trying not to cry.
We spent the rest of the afternoon moving from place to place, waiting for the rabbits to come out. I killed on my second and third shots, but after that I started missing on purpose. The sight of the dead rabbits turned my stomach. Their glassy, lifeless eyes. The blood, black like oil on their soft fur.
“Never mind,” my father had said. “Enough’s as good as a feast. And look!” he held the poor rabbits up for me to see. “You were fantastic!”
The sun was dipping down behind the woods and everything was bathed in the golden pink light of the late afternoon when he finally said we could head home. As we made our way across the field, he couldn’t have been happier. He marched, triumphant, the rabbits in one hand and his other in the pocket of his coat, the rifle hung through his arm. I followed behind, hunched forward and sullen.
It was the first dry day of April, and it had rained incessantly for a fortnight. The fields were like the pictures of no-mans land I had seen in my history textbook. We picked our way over the peaks of rough mud and around troughs filled with scummy water.
“Stop,” said my father suddenly raising his hand. “Stop! Look.”
He dropped into a squat and pointed out across the field towards the treeline. I stood there, hopelessly looking in the direction he was pointing, but I couldn’t see anything at all. He grabbed my arm and pulled me down to the ground.
“Along the edge of the woods. There’s a pheasant.”
The sun had set now and it was dusk. There wasn’t much light to see by, especially looking towards the dark cloud of the trees.
He stood up slowly and looked all about, scanning the horizon. “We should be alright,” he said. “You’ll only have one shot, mind. Any more and we’ll have the Keepers on us.”
“What’s a Keeper?” I asked.
“Men who wander the woods and stop people poaching pheasants. But since we’re out in the open we should be alright. If anyone does show up, we’ll be able to see them coming. And we can always say we’re after more rabbits. They won’t care about rabbits.”
I felt the nausea rising in my stomach again. I had hoped it was all over. I had done enough to please my father; I had done enough killing for a lifetime. My father placed the rabbits down on the ground and fished in his pocket for some shells. He loaded the gun, pulled back the bolt and handed it to me. “Go on, son,” he whispered. There was something in his voice that I’d not heard before. Hope. Or pride. Certainly not the usual gruff disappointment.
I swallowed hard and stretched out in the mud. Along the edge of the field I could just see a beautiful cock pheasant strutting along, pecking at the dirt. The blue feathers on his head shone in the fading light, with a perfect red mark across his face in the shape of a heart.
I shifted the barrel of the rifle and took aim. I thought that maybe the crack of the gun firing would cause the bird to fly into the shot, so I aimed a good few feet away from the pheasant, into the woods. I didn’t want to hit it, not even by accident.
I looked over at my father without moving my head. He was lying next to me, his eyes gleaming, glued to the pheasant, a broad smile on his face. “It’s now or never,” he said. “Take the shot.”
I closed my eyes and pulled the trigger. The explosion rang out across the field, and all at once, there were pheasants everywhere. They must have been sitting just inside the woods, and they all, hundreds of them, took flight, flapping and screeching and banging into one another in desperation, a mad panic to get away.
As the flapping and squawking died down, another noise came across the field. A voice calling. A man’s voice, shouting out in pain.
My father stood up. “You stay here,” he said. He trotted across the field to the edge of the trees. I stood up to see. Where the hill sloped away, there was a wide ditch along the edge of the field, filled with brown water. My father reached the edge of the ditch and stopped. He raised his hands to his face. I could hear the voice shouting again, and my father’s voice responding, but not the words.
There was something in his tone. Something was wrong.
I got up and ran towards him. As I came closer I could see a man on the woods side of the ditch, lying on the ground, holding his knee. There was blood all over his trousers and down his leg.
My father turned and saw me. “I said stay, god damn you!” he shouted. I stopped, stupid, and let the rifle fall to the ground.
The man saw me too. He pointed at the rifle with one hand, clutching at his knee with the other. “It bloody was you!” he shouted at my father. “I’ll bloody ‘ave you for this.” He gasped, clenching his face against the pain in his leg. “You’re in trouble. Big trouble.”
“We were out for rabbits,” said my father. “How were we to know you’d be there? What kind of idiot hides in the woods in the dark?”
“I’m a bloody Keeper, ain’t I?” said the man. “It’s my job to stop bastards like you from shootin’ the bloody birds. Just wait till I tell the police on you. I hope you’ve got a licence for that rifle, that’s all I’ll say.”
My father spun on his heel and looked down at the rifle. He closed his eyes and made his lips very thin.
“Oh dear,” said the Keeper. He shook his head. “You better say goodbye to your old man, sonny,” he sneered. “He’ll be goin’ away for a while I reckon.”
My father turned to me, then back to the man, then back to me again. He ran his ringers through his hair.
“Go and fetch the rabbits,” he said. “Get the rabbits, and keep walking that way.” He pointed back the way we had come.
“But Dad, that’s not…” I said. He stalked over to me and picked up the rifle. With his spare hand he spun me round by the shoulder and pushed me, forcefully away. “For god’s sake, go!” he shouted. “And don’t look back. Just go.”
I started walking back across the field. His voice followed me. “I’m warning you, don’t you let me see you turning around.”
The mud was deep and it sucked at my shoes, threatening to pull them off with each step, but I walked on. The rabbits hung loosely by my side. I wanted to go back and tell the Keeper what had happened, to explain that it had been an accident, that I was just trying to miss the pheasant, but I knew I had made a mess of things by showing the rifle and I didn’t dare to disobey my father.
Tears filled my eyes and made it hard to see. I blinked them away and swallowed hard. I wasn’t going to make things worse by crying.
The rifle cracked.
I nearly turned then, it took a huge amount of effort not to, but I stared hard at the ground and kept walking. All sorts of thoughts tried to get into my head, but I pushed them all away and concentrated on my feet, focussing only on walking, on putting one foot in front of the other.
A few seconds later my father appeared beside me, panting hard. “Come on,” he said. “We’ve got to get to the road.”
He put his hand on my shoulder and steered me to the left, so that we came to the hedgerow separating the field from the road. “Get through,” said my father. He crouched down and began to push his way through the brambles. My eyes flicked back across the field, searching for the Keeper, but I couldn’t see him.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Quiet,” said my father, firmly. “Get through.” That was all.
We made it through the hedgerow and onto the grey-black tarmac of the road. My father took the rabbits from me and marched away without another word.
When we came to the bridge just outside of town, he stopped. For a moment he looked out into the river, foaming and surging beneath us. He held up the rabbits and, with a great sweep of his arm, he swung them over his head and let them go. They spun, silently in the air, and disappeared into the churning brown water.
It wasn’t until we got home that I realised the rifle was gone too.
You can now show me how much you care and support my dangerous caffeine addiction AT THE SAME TIME! THANK YOU! x
Tom Cornfoot is a writer, designer, and illustrator. He’s spent over 30 years carefully developing a style of handwriting that’s almost illegible, doodling and failing to learn to play the guitar.
These stories are plucked from the air, like everything else. There’s no consistent link or thread, unless of course you find one, in which case, it was entirely planned that way.
Words and pictures © 2024 Tom Cornfoot
A fine tale, Tom. I like it when you select something for us from the archive. It is all new to me!