Free Cross Country Murder Song by Philip Wilding

terrified huddles on the floor, the weapon suddenly small, still and mute between them.
    He looked up and imagined he saw the man waving at him, but then he was gone in a slamming of doors and a squealing of tyres.
    He rolled over onto his back and sighed heavily; in the distance he could hear sirens wailing as the patrol cars neared. He wondered how long it would be before he’d see the unbroken sky again.

Chorus
    He knew he was driving too fast, but he couldn’t bring himself to ease back on the accelerator. He kept attempting to blink the old man in the bathroom stall away, but his face and his gun sat ghoulishly behind his eyelids. He reached under the passenger seat and found his own gun braced there against the metal frame. He looked up just in time to see that he was heading for the side of the road and was being flashed by an oncoming car possibly terrified that a driverless vehicle was headed his way. He pulled the wheel sharply back on course and gave a cheery wave as the other car raced past. Must have thought that was the strangest game of chicken he’d ever seen, said the driver quietly. He was laughing in spite of himself. He checked on the gun again and felt its weight in his palm, admired its shape and drew a thumb slowly across the matt black of the handle. He enjoyed the resistance of the trigger as the safety held.
    The first gun he’d seen had been his father’s, but he didn’t know whose it was when he’d stumbled across it wrapped in a oily rag. Their garden was a giant L framed by trees at the back of the house with an oblong pool set at its corner. In the summer his father would bob along its surface, the swell of his belly breaking the water as he grinned and waved his cigar around, his white legs, dashed with drifting swirls of black hair, the inflatable he lay on buckling with his weight. He’d laugh as the ash broke free of his cigar in dirty rings, floating stubbornly as smoky debris before seesawing slowly to the bottom of the pool. His father’s friends would laugh as his mother chastised him for smoking in the water. Hey, he’d say, it’s not like I’m going to set something on fire, and he’d cackle, the cigar playing at his lips.
    One afternoon he found his father standing silently in the kitchen. It was a Sunday and it was early for him to be back at home.
    Want to go for a drive, kid? he asked, staring out at the garden. His mother wasn’t home. He had no idea where she might be. Soon they were among the fields, his father gunning the engine as they passed a low red barn with acres of moving green beyond dotted with horses. He could see a boy standing among them, his hand reaching out to the tallest of the horses, his gesture making the animal wary, causing its head to pull back in quick jolts, its curious, beautiful eye regarding the approaching hand with caution. The horse took off with a snap of its mane, its tail suddenly whipping the air. The boy jumped back and the horse came at the fence at a gallop, the three-bar fence acting as a rickety sentry between the road and the farmland beyond. The horse ran its length, keeping pace with their car. His father grinned happily and opened up the engine and the horse harried itself on only feet away and they travelled momentarily neck and neck as if both were reaching to break an imaginary wire. The field divided at its corner and the horse spotted it before they did and threw himself back into the heart of the field, bucking and roiling, his head lolling happily, legs kicking hard as he ran out of sight.
    His father hit the driving wheel with his open hand. Hey, he exclaimed, hey!
    He grabbed his son’s shoulder. Did you see that? he asked, Damn, what a beautiful fucking thing. He looked at him. You don’t have to tell your mother I just said that, okay, he said.
    You see that horse? his father asked. He nodded. They’d both been made dizzy by the sparks of energy it had given