by Gabe Durham
Shooting Gallery Maury Postal
People needed guns to feel worthy of their clothes. People needed guns to finish sentences with integrity. They liked to fondle their guns, warm the barrels in their hands. Liked to rack them up on their walls. Take family pictures with them. Polish them up, Sundays, and rotate them in lit cases. Liked to sing songs about guns to their guns. Credit cards maxed thanks only to guns. Buy One of Every Gun was one game. Didn’t want to sully the guns shooting anybody. Hunters pitched rocks at ducks, ducks got riled, chased hunters back to their trucks. Aficionados armed to the nines robbed by kids with pocketknives. Archery sprees left no non-survivors, not even the one who tried to arrow himself at the end. Think of the arm-span, the musculature, the willpower it would take to arrow your own heart. Nobody faulted the bowman for failing—one woman even fell for him via post—but people were all rooting for each other back then is the difference. My whole generation gropes frantically under pillows in half-sleep. We wake with a start then remember when we are.
From Fun Camp; originally published in Nano Fiction.
About Fun Camp (from Frigg):
Fun Camp is a series of short monologues that take place in and around an eccentric pseudo-religious summer camp. It started as a bunch of little speeches, folks telling other folks what’s what and how it’s gonna be, until I wrote one on the rules at a summer camp and around the same time, landed on the title. The more I wrote about summer camp, the more I wanted to write about summer camp. And when I show parts of it to people, the comment I keep getting was, “More camp!” I agree. Camp is fun. Camp is camp.
Why, though? When fellow camp writer Lydia Conklin and I discussed it for the Hobart 11 Special Features page, she said, “I think it’s interesting how close to the brink of chaos camp is at any moment. Considering it’s a bunch of teenagers in charge of a bunch of children, there isn’t much stability at camp. If something were to go wrong, there aren’t really forces in place to deal with it.“ I like that answer. Mine was, “Camp appeals to me as a miniature self-contained temporary society that operates on an extremely different logical/moral system than the outside world.” Another way of putting it (having gone to my first writers conference last month): it’s just nice for the weirdos to get a little time away from the world now and then. And when we do, we make interesting specimens.
