(Courtesy of Secret Attic; winner of Secret Attic Short Fiction Contest)

Nobody goes into a pawnshop of their own volition. Massage parlors, check cashing stores, and pawnshops are bastard stepchildren of urban sprawl. Each was a necessary evil, providing unique services against the grain of suburban enlightenment. Seeking them out was akin to lighting a small piece of your soul on fire and inhaling the rancor smell of desperation and futility. 

These indoor flea markets permit voyeurs the schadenfreude of seeing someone’s unraveled life. Pawnshops all smell and feel the same. Mothballs tinged with crinkled, grease-stained bills and cut-rate ephemera. The red-eyed guilt of locking eyes with someone who was shopping out of necessity. This was not the trendy thrift store shopping rhapsodized in pop music. On the train line between Despair and Homelessness, this was one of the last stops.  

I didn’t enter willingly. Sometimes life dictates your actions in advance. 

On my first visit, I brought all the power tools I owned. A circular saw, saber saw, and a cordless drill. Once, they were the tools of my livelihood. I had no formal training, but I could talk a good game on any construction site and frame with the best of them. My white privilege meant the foreman was happy to have another English-speaking guy on the job to police things. They never bothered doing a background check on me. They should have been more concerned with policing me. Given the opportunity today, I’d steal every bit of copper piping I could. 

The bottle had a voracious grip on me. It was an expensive habit to feed, and power tools for jobs that no longer existed were useless to me.  Perhaps the dead-eyed crypt keeper behind the glass would pay enough to tie me over for a bit. It was an odd twist of fate selling the very thing that put food in your mouth. The irony was rich; unfortunately, you couldn’t rob irony.

The overextended markets and subsequent boom in housing ended like all other manias, with a flaccid whimper. Construction companies were underwater. Bloated with inventory that frequently succumbed to unexplained, freak fires. Shady developers could pull that off in California. Take out whole developments. Out there it was assumed to be an act of God. The result of climate change ignored by politicians whistling past the graveyard at 80 mph in Mercedes-Benzes with V-8 engines belching in wicked laughter. 

The same luck didn’t apply on the East Coast. A single fire was possible. Multiple fires were suspicious. Connecticut had more than its share of trial lawyers frothing at the possibility of a headline-grabbing fraud case. Anything to cover the Ivy League tuitions for their junior masters and mistresses of the universe in training.

On my second visit, I brought the shotgun my father gave me on my 17th birthday.

A rite of passage. 

My foray into manhood. 

As I ran my fingers along the polished chestnut stock and the length of the slender barrels, I was reminded of his only outward sign of respect, acknowledgment, or affection. A Churchill 28 gauge, side by side shotgun that easily cost him a month’s wages. It was a grossly negligent expenditure that the Chief had not run past my mother. 

I hustled it from my truck to the store. I didn’t need to catch the wandering eye of a local cop just itching to grind his boot down against my throat any further. My probation terms expressly prohibited access to any weapons. My licensed pistols had already been confiscated. Overzealous probation officers with spit-filled jowls salivated at the thought of tripping me up and sending the revolving door back to prison spinning. 

I wasn’t gonna make it easy for them.

The shotgun had remained well-hidden in my house. It had been an extension of my father for over thirty years. A proxy for his existence. Yet here I stood, rooted to the ground haggling with a scraggly-bearded hump of flesh lacking the ability to conceptualize tradition. His idea of honor was being loyal to his Fortnite clan and buying some lascivious skin for his female avatar to indulge his masturbatory fantasies. 

I was unloading a rite of passage into the Hot Pockets-stained hands of this vulture. He couldn’t comprehend the Norman Rockwellian visions I had of teaching my son to shoot. We would celebrate his first shot pheasant over a beer and whatever machismo rites of virility we could uphold. The bubbling, burgeoning of toxic masculinity at its finest, neutered by the long arm of the law. I was letting go of the gossamer-thin tethers that bound the generations of my family.

The Churchill, with its gorgeous Spanish inlaid detailing, was worth well over two grand. I couldn’t dare set foot 1000 yards near a gun show where I could easily get fifteen hundred or more. I was begging for $400. 

My son’s birthright. 

Not enough money to put a dent in rent, car payment, or doctors’ bills. It would cover my food and a selfish treat to numb the pain. 

The ghoul hemmed and hawed to avoid $400 like I was asking him to donate a kidney. I brightened at the thought of both chambers being loaded. His last vision would be of me seductively fingering the trigger and my shit-eating grin just before his grey matter was scattered over the original Imperial Japanese battle flag he proudly displayed behind the counter. 

I could turn the second barrel on me. We could be two headless horsemen in a steeplechase to Hell.

The grease-covered bills were pocketed as I sought the nearest decent liquor store. It wasn’t going to be a plastic bottle of bourbon night. I would imbibe the finest brown nectar that Kentucky’s oak-smoked barrels produced. Nothing but top-shelf booze for me. Maybe even splurge on a steak. Guns were ubiquitous; I could get one any time I wanted. 

If I needed.

Maybe I’d call my kid.

I’ll be damned if I even had his number.