“You should sleep on it. Maybe you’ll wake up with an answer,” Olivia suggested.
“Maybe,” I agreed, but wasn’t convinced it would be that easy. “Speaking of which . . .” I looked over at the clock: two a.m. “I have to open in the morning.”
Olivia disappeared, and I left everything out as I flipped off the light switch and crawled into bed.
Who knew? Maybe I would have an answer in the morning.
***
I was dreaming.
I stood inside a grocery store, and I knew with certainty that this was the grocery store. The grocery store where my parents were murdered.
Customers shopped and walked casually down the aisles.
It was like any other store, nothing unique, nothing special, no reason to fear for your life.
My parents turned down an aisle with their cart, and I wanted to hit pause and stay in this moment of the dream forever, because in this moment they were still alive, but I had no control. I was witnessing their death, and there was nothing I could do about it.
Hannah and Paul Arnold.
My mother and father, who looked almost waxy and cartoon-like as they strolled forward, a cart full of groceries. They laughed and talked without a care in the world. Black mist and mold began to grow on the shelves of food on either side of them like veins pumping in pure darkness.
I wanted to wake up.
I didn’t want to see what came next.
But I was stuck there, forced to watch their murder. This wasn’t the first time, either. I’d seen this hundreds of times in my dreams, in my nightmares.
The blackness spread over people, floors, ceiling, and food as a young man in a mask walked into the grocery store. I knew he was a young man because they had arrested him quickly, and I had memorized every feature of his face, though he hid it now behind his stretch-wool ski mask. He carried a gun, if it could be called that. It looked more like a machine gun or something a sniper out of a movie would carry. An assault rifle, the news had called it. A weapon that killed efficiently and effectively.
The boy didn’t say a word. He simply lifted his rifle and began shooting as if he were in some kind of deranged target practice session.
The gunshots were so loud I thought for sure I’d wake up. I hoped I’d wake up. I prayed I’d wake up.
The screams became as loud as the gunfire.
Bodies fell to the floor, disappearing in puffs of black smoke.
My parents had no time to react, to hide, to move . . . anything that might have saved them.
A bullet hit my mother’s head, and she died instantly, body falling into my father.
Then three bullets hit Dad’s back, and the two of them dropped to the floor, holding each other in death.
The young man walked over to my parents in the aisle. The blackness fully surrounded them, the shelves now molded brick, the ground rotted cement. We stood in the alley. The place where evil lived.
The shooter spit on my parents’ corpses, then pulled off his mask.
It wasn’t the young man who looked down on my parents.
It was me.
It was morning, and I sat on the edge of my bed. I was still shaken from my dream last night. Seeing my face in the face of my parents’ killer wasn’t exactly what I’d call a good time. I blamed my grandmother entirely, for giving me the gun.
Space was limited since I left my cutting table out, but I managed to bend down and pull out the dreaded box holding the revolver, without hitting my head on anything.
Lifting the lid, I stared at the weapon for a good five minutes, not sure what I wanted to do.
The dream made me want to both carry the gun with me and throw it into a river at the same time. One well-aimed shot could have saved everyone in that grocery store. Not that I knew how to aim, not that I could have been the one to save them, but still. It had my head racing with possibilities.
Was I really going to carry this thing? Bring it with me everywhere I went? Bring it to work? I didn’t even know how to use it. Grandma was right about that—I’d need lessons. Honestly, I wasn’t sure how the thing worked. The only experience I had with the machinations of guns was television and movies, and they just seemed to pull the trigger. And would I be able to do that? Pull the trigger?
I didn’t know.
I wasn’t ready to think about that.
But I was ready to stuff it in my backpack. Okay, not ready ready, but I was going to do it all the same. Give it a day. Then I would know how it felt keeping a weapon on me. A gun. How I’d feel having a gun with me during my day. If it drove me to nutzoidville (which I was already thinking it would) then I’d ask Grandma to return it. But . . . if I did decide to keep it, we’d make it official and I’d take lessons.
I sighed in a strange kind of relief.
Deciding to not decide felt good.
Test run.
Yes.
Good.
Okay.
Carefully, I placed the large revolver into the bottom of my backpack and put a cardigan sweater on top for . . . space? Cushioning? Safety? I had no idea, but I decided to wrap it around the gun as if this would somehow stop bullets if I jostled it by accident (knowing full well a flimsy cotton sweater would do absolutely nothing to stop a bullet). Then I put my drawing pad and a few pencils in as well, in case there was some downtime to work on designs. One more thing. I rummaged through
