Boys will be boys

I played it because it was his favourite game. We’d do it every summer, when the surface of the fetid swamps on his family’s grounds would shimmer with the blistering heat. On those evenings, the air was heavy and sweating, swollen with flocks of dragonflies that pulsed and wheeled over the water. We didn’t bother with shoes, and every step we took tore bladed strips of grass through the soles of our feet.

We’d sometimes play on his back porch in the early evening, but he always said that it was too easy. He swore the best ground was the marshy lake behind his house, and though it stank of wood rot and festered with insects there, I didn’t argue. I didn’t dare. I never tried to pretend I enjoyed it, but hatred turned to dislike and dislike became empty apathy.

The rules were very simple: shoot the empty cans on one side of the pond from the other. He’d line them up with unnaturally delicate hands, occasionally offering some brief anecdote about where he found them, always crushing the metal under his foot if he wanted to challenge me. Testing me was a sport of his.

He never missed, of course. He was good with a gun. I was hopeless.

The weapon always shivered in my hands, writhing to get away from an ungrateful owner. With blood roaring in my ears and sweat prickling under my shirt, I’d steel myself for the right moment, the exact right angle that’d spare me from losing – if only once.

I never found it. He bared his teeth in a canid’s grin, snatched the gun from me and punctured them effortlessly, violent cracking sounds slashing through the sludgy air. His eyes gleamed at me as he swung the gun to aim at my chest, knocking the breath from my ribs.

“You know what happens to losers,” he said, exhilaration flushing his deadly words. Something sick came over him when he won, power creeping like a disease into his teenage veins. “You have to follow the rules.”

I glanced down at the gunshot scars that deformed my bare right foot, some of them old, some still scabbing over.

I was afraid, but I knew. Those were the rules.