Free Tough Day for the Army by John Warner

of the gun first on the standing lamp, then on the dresser, then lamp, and finally the fleshy spot where our neck meets our shoulder, Sheriff Seager is thankful as well, since the actual firing of a gun at another person, especially an unarmed one without any clothes on, almost always leads to serious, nearly permanent regrets. You’d have to ask him about that, though.
    There is a certain precise ballet to the double play. Because of this, they are rare in high school ball. Nevertheless, we regret not running our feeble grounder out harder. We said this over and over at the time. Sorry sorry sorry, please don’t. Ouch ouch. Sorry sorry sorry, so sorry. Ouch.
    Sometimes we have regrets over finding and realizing love late in life, but these regrets are eased by love’s presence.
    Apparently it’s always “Larry,” never “Lar.” This won’t happen again, we swear. Let us buy you a beer.
    Truthfully, we were a little surprised that we made contact at all, so it wasn’t a failure to run hard, but the split-second (or slightly longer than split-second) hesitation that killed us. Once we started running, it was really as fast as we could manage.
    That the realization of this love has come at the expense of another man causes barely noticeable regrets.
    We’re conflicted about our father’s tears on that night after we failed to move the runner over and were stuffed in the locker.
    Did the Hauer gun company have to make the butt of the HP-9 model so hard and kind of pointy? We regret they decided to do that for sure. Our shoulder feels like it’s going to hurt for some time. Do you hear that, the clicking noise when it’s raised? There it is again. Do you think it’s a tendon?
    We still do regret that we couldn’t run faster.
    We double-checked it, time, date, everything. We looked the date up on the calendar and the channel in the on-screen guide. We were very thorough and careful because we knew it was important.
    If we’d really been thinking, rather than screaming and pounding at the inside of the locker door, knowing full well that the teammates who stripped us naked, black-markered “Loser” on our forehead, and shut us in the locker in the first place were not going to let us out, we would have tried some deep, centering breaths, in order to get as comfortable as possible while waiting for morning’s custodial crew.
    We lied about having “barely noticeable” regrets over our love coming at the expense of another man. Truth is, we have no regrets at all. None.
    We regret offering to buy Larry Billings, who is, we’ve come to find out, a recovering alcoholic, a beer.
    None.
    You see, the thing about this prefabricated furniture is that the predrilled holes for the premeasured screws never quite line up, which means you really have to torque those things in there in order to get it all assembled, only to realize that the faux-woodgrain contact-paper side is facing the wrong way is really frustrating, and after a couple of hours of sweat getting the thing so it at least stands up mostly level and unwobbly, thinking about starting over again makes us want to cry, which is something we haven’t done in quite a few years.
    Words of praise go out to the makers of the Megaflex progressive resistance muscle training system. No regrets about that purchase, no sirs!
    Julie Norman releasing us from the locker imprisonment was a mixed blessing to be sure. On the plus side, we did not have to wait for the custodial crew, and just after we tumbled from the locker, there was the brief clutching to her sweater-covered chest, the smell of fall and pencil erasers. But there was also her sad eyes on our cold, fish-belly skin. That was hard to take.
    While we’re glad that Sheriff Seager “must’ve slipped on the rug” (as he claims) after landing the initial shoulder blow with the Hauer HP-9, we think it’s more likely that our