Target Practice
by Eric Beeny

Mason remembered his first coloring book, something about a bear or a fish or, something.

With a box of cheap crayons, on a cold hardwood floor under a blanket of dark blue carpet, he’d lie on his stomach, trying accurately to scribble the bear’s or the fish’s likeness, not trying to mess up by coloring the space around its body—but it was hard.

Mason just had twitchy hands, he guessed.

Still does.

He’d color and color, trying to create some scene of life he’d never seen.

He’d never been camping or gone to the beach, and there weren’t any woods or creeks anywhere around the projects he grew up in.

To Mason, Histogram City looked like a cardboard cutout itself, cut out of a skyline he always for that reason thought of as bluish-grey construction paper.

Why the mosquito bites, he wondered.

Looking at old photographs of steel workers sitting on the beams of not-yet-built skyscrapers a mile up eating turkey sandwiches out of tin lunch boxes hung up on bathroom walls, he always thought of safety scissors.

His twitchy hands.

So, coloring, he could never color just the bear or the fish.

Always the long, elliptical loops like solar flares bursting out of the bear or fish, as if they were being hunted and just got shot or speared so a dose of blood flew out of them like a nurse testing a syringe with a few little squirts.

Mason wasn’t cut out for coloring.

He could never stay within the lines.

Now he managed an office.

It’s good he didn’t own a gun.

 

ERIC BEENY is the author of Snowing Fireflies (due out in summer 2010 from Folded Word Press) and The Dying Bloom (Pangur Ban Party). His work has been published or will appear in 3:AM, Abjective, elimae, >kill author, Matchbook, Pear Noir!, PANK, Spilt Milk, and others. He’s a contributing editor for Gold Wake Press. His blog is Dead End on Progressive Ave. He’s working on a B.A. in English, and has no idea what he wants to be when he grows up. He’s 28.

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