Extract: Ballistics

Empedocles: Having seen a small part of life, swift to die, a
man rises and drifts like smoke, persuaded only of what he
has happened upon as he is borne away.

On a Friday evening in September, some time ago, a friend of mine spilled a bottle of lager across her lap and slurred her curiosity about how it all began, that summer I spent in a scour across the Kootenays.

She doodled her finger through the caramel froth yeasting on the surface of her thighs. I thought about getting her a paper towel, but I thought about a lot of things. We were taking pot shot sat empty beer cans with my grandfather’s .22 calibre, and I’d lost my aim to nerves and thoughts and the restlessness that endures when adventures come to an uncertain close. I touched a scar on my cheek, about as long as a pocket knife, and wondered a moment after the Dead and the Gone.

How it all began – that’s a good question. That’s a philosophical question. It’s like asking when a bullet starts toward the beer can. Is it at the moment slug exits muzzle? When I lean on the trigger? Somewhere among those hours spent checking and re-checking the chamber? It could be the munitions line, or the semi-trailer hauling shells down Highway One, or the clerk at the hardware store who retrieves the carton from the glass. It could be strictly mechanical – hammer strikes casing, spark, ignition, trajectory – but over seventy parts make up the firing mechanism of a bolt-action rifle, even more if you count the bones of the human hand, the arm, the muscles and nerves and the synapses each themselves firing. A

nd then, getting really philosophical, there’s the Gunsmith’s Paradox: to reach its target, a bullet must first travel half-way, and to travel half-way it must first travel a quarter, an eighth, a sixteenth, smaller and smaller, such that it will never reach its destination, such that it won’t even start to move. This means nobody can ever be shot. This means no journey can ever end.

How it all began? Well, I can trace Gramps’ defects all the way to his childhood: shrapnel he blocked with his sternum when he was seven, the result of a dud artillery round on a beach not slingshot range from home; a welding arc that dashed across his chest while he tempted his body’s conductivity in the rain; smoke inhalation, steam scalds, stress levels, and a consistent blood-alcohol for all those years strapped inside a Nomex jacket with Volunteer Fire stencilled across the shoulders.

That’s his history, but if I were to pinpoint the moment when everything Began, capital B, the summer my family’s past came a-knocking, I say this: at eighty-two years old, Gramps had his heart attack.

Ballistics by D.W. Wilson is published by Bloomsbury in August.