The gun looks wrong,
you know what I mean?
Two-tone gray – cubicle gray,
rubber shoe sole gray – and
a cadmium trigger. Dead
red-orange. Simple as a stapler.
Nintendo calls it The Zapper.
No one calls it that. It’s just the gun.
A duck soars and you shoot it,
dead in the sky. A dog
grabs its neck, holds it limp,
an eight bit grotesquerie for
Little Jack Horner
shooting birds in the corner.
I gather them. I stroke
greasy plumes, thumb torn out holes, I struggle
to hold them. The effort of it all.
The thuds. The corpses, heavier than I’d thought.
All around a floor of black feathers.
A floor of orange beaks and my limp plastic gun.
— Kelli Dianne Rule is an author of dark fiction who claims roots in the backwoods of Florida. Recent writings may be found in Heavy Feather Review, Slipstream, BULL, JMWW, Luna Station Quarterly and The Avenue Journal, among others. Her short story anthology, Florida, Deep and Dark, is currently in the works. Follow her work at www.kellirule.com. “The Gun Looks Wrong” was originally published in Issue 45 of Slipstream.