Morning all. I hope you had a wonderful weekend. I had a dream last night that clowns took my mother hostage and they kept trying to communicate their demands through horn honks and interpretive dance moves. By the time I figured out the hors were in Morse code my alarm went off so I still don’t know why they would have kidnapped my mom. I will be thinking about that today and thought you should wonder as well. But now, on to the morning prompt. Timers set and off we go.
Not where I thought this would go, but a fun start.
Monday, July 28th: He offered me a lazy grin.
He offered me a lazy grin. “You want to try don’t you?” he asked.
“No,” I responded automatically.
He held the paint ball gun out to me. “I’m sure you’d be pretty good.”
“I don’t like guns.” I replied crossing my arms.
“It’s not a real gun and it is all about building your hand eye coordination. Besides, you are just shooting at a target.” He swung his arm to the filed in front of him and I saw quite a few paint spattered objects scattered around the yard, each marked with a target. Some were larger, some smaller. A row was lined up. I assumed these were for practice and that the other smaller targets were for when the straight line of targets was too simple. Earlier I had seen him execute some faux movie style commando moves as he want after the other targets.
“I’m not rolling around on the ground,” I told him.
“You can go for the line of targets,” he told me. “I’ll put in a different color so you can know where your shots hit.” He went and picked up a separate gun. He loaded it with pellets that looked toxic green in color. As his were red and looked a little too blood like for my taste I was okay with the toxic green.
‘Maybe it will feel like shooting radioactive aliens,’ I thought. I wasn’t sure why aliens would be radioactive but as I knew radioactive things didn’t stay alive for long it would at least be like putting them out of their misery.
‘Nothing is alive,’ I reminded myself as he walked over.
He gave me a brief tutorial on the operation of the paintball gun and passed it to me. I pulled the trigger to test the resistance, sending a pellet onto the ground. It made a small divot in the ground and green goo spilled out.
“Just imagine it is someone you really, really hate,” he said. “Then shoot them in the forehead.”
“I don’t think I actually hate anyone enough to actually think about shooting them in the forehead.” I told him. I frowned and looked at him. Who do you hate that much?”
He shrugged. “It’s more about annoyance. Its therapeutic. I shoot them here when they annoy me and then I can deal with them more easily later, because I’ve already pictured them getting all banged up with the paint ball.”
“So you don’t actually picture them dead?”
“Nope,” he said. “That would be kind of psychotic. I just imagine them bruised and dripping with paint.”
“Okay,” I said slowly. I turned away and took my place lined up in front of the line of targets. I didn’t want to play commando with the more difficult ones. I remembered my training, blocking out Ian’s advice as he continued to tell me how to shoot. I lined up my target and took my shot.
“It pulls a bit,” I said to myself.
Ian snorted. “Close to dead center.” He snorted again and crossed his arms. “Take another shot.”
“I shrugged, remembered the pull and again lined up. This time my shot hit dead center of the target.
“I thought you said you never shot before,” Ian said. His voice sounded sulky.
“I didn’t say that,” I replied. “I said I didn’t like guns not that I didn’t know how to use them.”
“Take another shot.”
“This was a bad idea.” I said. I started to hand him the gun. He refused to take it.
“I want to see if you just got lucky.
Ten til Midnight 