New Dead Families

My Winchester had jammed. I began to urinate myself a little.

“You unholy fool!” he said. This profane bastard was my target. I had been sent by official forces to kill him. And I failed it. “You goddamn idiot,” he said, pointing his Colt revolver at my heart. “Thinking I was asleep.”

“Don’t put God into this.” I said. “This ain’t about him.”

“The hell it ain’t! Why do you think events have transpired as such? You sneakin’ up on me asleep. Your rifle gumming up like that. This is some divine intervention, you dim motherfucker.”

“It’s poor circumstance. Nothing else in it.”

“For you, maybe. For me it’s affirmation. It affirms that everything I believe to be good and holy in this world is correct and true. It means I am right in my life and secure with my Lord. It means God has abandoned you.”

“I’ve given God no offense,” I said. “And you shut your mouth with that talk. You ain’t no preaching type, far as I can tell.”

“That’s rich!” he said. “How many years you got on that stinking creased face of yours, old man?”

I looked at my boots. “Forty-seven.”

“Forty-seven!” This coarse bastard was laughing and slapping his thighs in a gross mimicry of a rodeo clown. “For forty-seven years your God has been directing you through all of space and time to this right here. This culmination. And your life, you sick old fool, you incompetent assassin, is what God intends me to conclude.”

His Colt cracked off a round, but the cylinder was bad and it exploded in his hand.

“Goddamn false Chinese armament! Goddamn quality control!” My executioner had leapt off his horse’s saddle and was flapping his mangled hand.

I took up my Winchester like a pointed lance and delivered it straight through his soft midsection. It went through him and into the belly of his horse. The horse did not deserve it.

“You should have improvised, you dead bastard” I said. “A man cannot depend on mechanics alone.”

As I watched him die the usual panic came over me. God wasn’t through sending me in ill directions. He is one who is truly blinkered, although not one of those bearded men had the nerve in him to write it down at the time. Cruel Magician. That I knew for certain.

I mounted my steed, Tell Me About It, and pointed us toward the dimming redness on the horizon. I would go bowling tonight. I would bake a pie. Because I was again tired, and I was again afraid.