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Show •167 would have fallen to the floor if Jacob hadn't stretched out a hand and caught it halfway down. Sometimes my older brother showed these surprising flashes of grace and coordination; other times, as Adam used to tell him, he couldn't seem to grab his ass with both hands. "I'd forgotten he had a rifle," I said. "Even when I left home I don't think he'd used it for years." My dad bought it when he first began to garden in Oregon, with the intention of shooting gophers and other pests, but gradually, as happens with people who are more than commonly afraid to die, he became fanatical about not killing even insignificant creatures and the gun was put away. I turned the cartridge in my hand; looked at bottom-first it resembled a tiny imperfect sun's disk, nicked on one edge by the firing-pin as if touched by the moon's shadow at the start of an eclipse. When I was very little I used to dream that the sun fell out of the blue sky and went rolling on the ground in front of me, hardly bigger than a grapefruit. My dreaming self even now has not learned any notion of proper size; it reduces the round earth to a marble that bounces into the corner of a black room, where I must go hunting for it on my hands and knees, desperate-a recurring dream. I looked at Jacob. "Are you all right?" I said. His eyes were strange. |