A little bit of fiction.....

Revolver

The strangers at the first foster home I went to when I was eight years old told me to call them Auntie and Uncle. Auntie and Uncle were old. They punished me for strange things; fidgeting at the supper table, not learning my bible verse, tracking chicken shit into the porch. The only form of punishment they knew was to send me to my room. Auntie stood with her hand on the door at the bottom of the stairs. "Up you go my girl and don't come down till I call you." I hung my head and started up the stairs as she closed the door.
My room had a low, slanted ceiling. A window that looked out on the driveway, a caragana hedge, the neighbour's cows across a fence. There was a magic little door in my room; I had to duck to get under it. It lead to a place under the house eaves that was full of treasures. Old clothes, Auntie's old underwear with long laces and hard plastic ribs. Magazines from 1932. Piles of cloth flour sacks that said 'Lake of the Woods Milling Company.' Some kind of old uniform. Boxes of black and white photographs. Shoes and a gun. It was just like the gun cowboys had in the movies, like Gun Smoke's gun. I had to use both hands to lift that cold, grey revolver. There was a picture of the Queen above my bed. I pointed the gun at her many times; holding it up with both hands, pulling the trigger, feeling the clink of another empty chamber rolling up to the firing pin. When I got tired of shooting the Queen I opened the three small holes at the bottom of my window and put the gun barrel through one of them. I aimed at all the neighbour's cows and pretended to shoot them one by one.
I could hear the clack, clack of Auntie's treadle sewing machine downstairs as she sewed pretty dresses and blouses for me. When the sewing machine stopped I always hid the gun back under the eaves, behind a blue metal suitcase, before Auntie called me downstairs, asked if I was sorry for my misbehaviour. I would behave for a few days but then the longing for all the old things behind the magic door would overtake me and I tracked in more chicken shit. Auntie called it chicken daub and when I announced that it was chicken shit I knew I would have a whole afternoon to play with the gun.
When I was eleven years old Uncle got sick. I moved on to what would eventually be three more foster homes. Forty years later I still have pain in my neck from discipline received at one home; that hell hole. A place where I really could have used Uncle's gun.