Free Nursery Tale by T. M. Wright

warm. Then, toward the end of the month, the air grew chill and for the very first time, a still, ragged, horizontal line of chimney smoke, caught in a freak temperature inversion, hung over the small cluster of inhabited houses.
    Outside Granada, in the stand of woods a half mile to the west, in the fields of quack grass, in the long-untended apple orchards to the north, the sudden rush of autumn caught many creatures by surprise. A gaggle of Canadian geese, which had early in the afternoon stopped to water itself at a small, stagnant pond, hurried noisily into the air again; it would soon stop somewhere else. Only the first snowstorm would push the geese on in earnest.
    A hundred thousand grasshoppers and a million crickets finished their lives quickly, leaving their egg sacs behind for the spring.
    And in several places, the autumn came and brought fear with it. It was the fear caused by ignorance, and pain, and knowledge—the knowledge that in the winter's cold, death came. It was the way of things.
    And the eyes that studied Granada, that studied the pretty line of chimney smoke, and the warm lights, and the dark shapes of the houses, saw all of it now with the very crude beginnings of understanding.
    Laughter, like small, dense flights of insects, rose up in several places that night and dissipated very slowly in the still air.
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    N orm Gellis owned two long-guns—a thirty-five-year-old Remington 760 pump-action rifle, and a Weatherby 20-gauge, semi-automatic over-andunder shotgun. Both guns were kept standing, barrel up, in a locked closet in his bedroom. Twice a year on his birthday (because the rifle had been an eighteenth-birthday gift from his father) and on Christmas Eve (because Marge had given him the shotgun fifteen years earlier as a Christmas gift. "I'm going to take up hunting again, Marge," he'd told her), he cleaned the guns thoroughly. The cleanings were essentially unnecessary because he had never used the shotgun, and had fired the rifle only five times, on various hunting trips with his father. Beyond wounding a doe very slightly on one of those trips, he had never hit anything. He was a terrible shot. "You're too nervous," his father told him. "Why are you so damned nervous?" But the young Norm could only grin stupidly and plead ignorance. He didn't want to explain that, drawn as he was to "the overwhelming thrill of the hunt" (as his father put it), long-guns frightened him overwhelmingly. He thought that if there were such a thing as "instant shellshock" then he had it, and it was incurable. It was the noise, he felt certain, and the vibration, and the recoil. And perhaps there were some other factors—the weight and size of the gun, for instance—but he had never taken the time to think it through completely. His father had called him a coward on their final hunting trip, and he didn't want to find, upon self-examination, that it was true.
    He thought the Smith & Wesson Model 12 .38 Police Special he held on his open right hand now was quite a striking little piece of equipment. Small, blunt-nosed, easily concealed. He had fired it several dozen times, and it was loud, sure, but not nearly as loud as the damned long-guns, and the recoil was practically nonexistent. And he had found that, remarkably, his confidence with the gun had made him into a passable marksman. (He had been taught the bent-legged, straight-armed, two-handed method of firing; he thought it looked good on him.)
    Marge, across the living room from him, looked up from her magazine. "Norm, I'm really very uncomfortable with that thing around." She had been toying with the proper words for half an hour, ever since Norm had gotten the gun from its hiding place ("You'd put a big hole in yourself, Marge, so to keep you from messin' with it, I'm gonna hide it. Okay?"), but, after the words came out, she thought she might have offended him, so she immediately attempted to amend the words: "I don't mean . . . please