From behind the smoke came the man with the roaring gun. At first glance that was all he was. A man. With a gun. Making a gun-popping noise. A white man, very pale skin. The gun groaned and spluttered, emptying its deadly cargo into the room. Everything froze momentarily. Then people started to drop. Mrs Killim. Mr Knop. The Farjazaray couple who I knew had only been married two months and were already having affairs with other people. The child of the Ethiopian immigrants; I couldn’t remember her name. Their expressions blended perplexity and guttural horror. As they fell, they released worldly experiences of love, regret, calamity, success. I could swear I momentarily saw them release their link to earthly life as well. But then, perhaps that was just me romanticising the situation. My gaze shifted back again to the man. The one with the gun. He wore a strange expression. And a strange hat. Well not strange. More like unfamiliar. But I was sure I had seen it somewhere. On a box of cereal perhaps- seemed like an odd place for a hat like that. An acrid burnt smell now caught in my nose. It reminded me of the faulty toaster we had when I was a kid in upper lower class suburbia. If you weren’t paying attention, this toaster would crucify whatever you put in it. The house would fill with a haze and virtually unmovable odour. How long the pungence stayed depended totally on the degree of incineration and the type of food incinerated. Pop tarts were the worst. Their molten innards would ooze out from behind the charred pastry and cling to the toaster’s metallic insides in a hardened mess. Away from the many thoughts engulfing my mind I again registered this strange-hatted man. He was now moving. Walking. An urgent, but business-like walk. The barrel of the device continued to turn. Where was he going? Or coming? He shot to the sides. I was in the middle. Behind the desk. I spied my in-tray filled with visa applications that had to be processed that day. Next to that was a framed photo of my Maltese Terrier, Hussein, embossed with the words “only my dog understands me”. Next to that was an Eiffel Tower snow globe. The gun-pop noise stopped and his shadow now lurked over me. His cylindrical face had neat contours. His left eyebrow twitched rhythmically to a tune of nervousness. A brownish stain above his crimson upper lip suggested he had recently ingested a cappuccino. His dark eyes of indeterminate colour seemed filled with things he wanted to say. He uttered one lonely, breathy syllable: “ah...”.Later that year, I experienced a whirlwind of artistic enthusiasm for this particular incident. I searched the garden shed for the old zeroing target board that my mother used to shoot her Smith and Weston Centennial at for stress relief. It was the only hard backed, frame-shaped thing I could find. I rejected the idea of stapling a sheet of clean canvas over the board. Instead, I cooked up a charcoal-paint imprint of that day straight onto the board’s neat squares and occasional bullet hole. The man. With the strange hat. The loud noise. The nostril curdling smell. The man who had stepped into the wrong office. Who had, for some inexplicable reason, picked up blanks instead of real bullets. And who thought that wearing a Quaker hat to a massacre was an act of irony.
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LAUREN O’MAHONY teaches in the School of Media, Communication and Culture at Murdoch University in Western Australia. Her current preoccupations include finishing her doctoral dissertation on Feminism and Romance in Contemporary Women’s Popular Fiction and doing as many triathlons as her body will withstand. Her current distractions are a crazy tortoiseshell cat named Issabelle, her sporadically productive vegetable garden and creative (and not so creative) writing. James Michener is one of her muses: “I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.”
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LAUREN O’MAHONY teaches in the School of Media, Communication and Culture at Murdoch University in Western Australia. Her current preoccupations include finishing her doctoral dissertation on Feminism and Romance in Contemporary Women’s Popular Fiction and doing as many triathlons as her body will withstand. Her current distractions are a crazy tortoiseshell cat named Issabelle, her sporadically productive vegetable garden and creative (and not so creative) writing. James Michener is one of her muses: “I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.”