… that’s how Amy and Renaldo tricked the two of us, telling each of us that we were just going to the shooting range and never mentioning another person. They placed us together in a tree stand separate from them.

We talked about how we loved shattering a clay pigeon mid-arc, but we couldn’t imagine shooting a real bird or anything else.

We talked about the things we could kill: time, a wine bottle, rats in our kitchens. We talked about how we’d had this conversation with Amy and Renaldo for years: but you eat meat / yes but I don’t eat much meat / well you can’t kill half an animal, my dear lentil lover, and you love being out in nature / yes, but I don’t want to kill nature / but you’re an animal, aren’t we all omnivores, our teeth…, and our animal nature is to kill to survive, as innate as breathing, mating, birthing, nursing…our maternal/paternal instinct.

We talked about how we should have worn more layers. We sniffled vigorously, neither one of us wanting to be the first one to blow their nose in front of the other. 

We were surprised that the hunting area was so close to Lookout Park with its Sandhill cranes, challenging nature trail, and the (now demolished) giant slide that flung children about on its hot metal surface. 

We talked about how long it was since we’d climbed a tree and or built a  fort and played hide-and-seek in the woods.

We saw a twelve-point buck at the same time, and we raised our rifles at the same time—just to see it through the sight—and were startled by how our hearts pounded, how our breathing slowed, an abrupt clarity, then the unresisting pull of our triggers.  There was a movement and an echo that was not an echo, but Renaldo’s rifle, and a stagger, a fall, and Renaldo shouting “I got him, I got him,” and we agreed while we made our way down the tree that it must have been, certainly was, Renaldo because he was, after all, the best shot of all of us.

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Michelle Morouse’s work has appeared recently in Vestal Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Gemini, Midwest Review, Prose Online, Bending Genres, Best Microfiction, The MacGuffin, and Unbroken. She is a Detroit area pediatrician and a Pushcart nominee.