Free Borrowed Horses by Sian Griffiths

early hunting trip. She’d just gotten her first gun for her birthday—her sixth. She had been on hunting trips before, but this would be the first time she went armed. Her father had talked gun safety, and they’d shot paper targets for weeks. She hadn’t tried to kill anything yet, and she was itching to. A picture of her cousin stood on the mantel, a grouse gripped by its legs in his tiny fist, his first kill. She was eager to have her picture next to his, so when she and her father went in the woods that day and she saw a chickadee fitting in the branches of a hawthorn, she asked if she could shoot it. Her dad laughed. “Sure, Baby Doll,” he said.
    She pulled the trigger and hit her target. It fell quickly and without struggle: one shot, one kill. “Immediately, I knew I’d done something wrong,” she said. “Knew it without looking at my dad or hearing his low whistle. It looked like an exploded golf ball laying there, not a bird. I’d done that. I turned to Dad so he could tell me I’d done right, but I could see by his face that he was shaken. He said, ‘hot damn,’ and his voice was unsteady. ‘I didn’t think you’d actually hit it.’” She’d said it looked smaller than it had in the tree. Not meat, not threatening, just a small innocent thing she’d killed to prove she could.
    Dave interjected here. “You were too young to know.”
    Dawn sized him up with her gaze. “I don’t know about that. I knew I could hit it, or at least, I was pretty sure I could. And I knew I shouldna done it. It seems like I could have put two and two together before pulling the trigger.”
    My teeth felt like they were beginning to float in my mouth. Our waitress came and wrote our food orders wordlessly, and I thought about my father. When he was nine, he’d found a nesting seagull in some rocks on an ocean cliff side. Practicing for the baseball team, he decided to test his aim by throwing rocks at the bird to make her fly. He’d thrown wide at first, but when she didn’t move, he threw closer. Then, a rock went a little off from where he’d meant to throw and hit her squarely in the head, which instantly dropped. He knew he’d killed her and her unborn chicks in their eggs. He watched and waited until the sun set, praying constantly that she wasn’t really dead, but prayers aren’t so very strong.
    The waitress waddled off to the kitchen, and Dawn continued her story. “Dad tried to make me feel better about it when we got home. We even took the bird to show my mom. It was so light when I picked it up, but in the truck home, it seemed to get heavier and hotter. It itched in my hand. Dad took my picture with the Polaroid, me holding it up by its little foot, and he stuck the thing in the freezer so I could show my cousins at Sunday dinner.”
    At the head of the table, Russ was unable to stay serious any longer and sputtered something incoherent about bird-sicles. Soon everyone, Dawn included, was laughing. Dave caught my smile and held it. For the hair of an instant, I wondered what would happen if I responded to his desire. “That damned Polaroid is still on their mantel,” Russ said as soon as he was able to get the words out.
    Dave volunteered Jenny to go next, putting his hand on her shoulder as he did and letting it sit there. My jaw clenched and I tilted in a little margarita to loosen it. My foot could reach forward—I could touch his toe—instead, I reached again for my drink.
    Jenny stunned no one with her totally lame regret: “I regret cursing my father.”
    “Fuck me if that counts.” Dawn reeled back in her chair. “I spill my guts about shooting a poor little baby bird and the best you can come up with is cursing your daddy?”
    I regretted taking Jenny, so inexperienced, trail-riding and getting her hurt. I regretted swiping Lemonheads from Rosauer’s and cheating on my U.S. history midterm in high school, though I never got caught at either. I regretted leaving my mother for New