Excerpt: The Bullet Catcher

I was 15 when I first met the bullet catcher. Of course, I didn’t know what he was when he first walked into the bar. But there was something about him; something different from the usual bar flies and drunkards. I watched him from the back, I was short, still am, though I do have a few more inches on me now, and just tall enough to see him clearly through the scratched, foggy kitchen door porthole and over the back of the bar at which he sat, hunched over the dirty, food plastered counter.

***

Something, though, was different. He wasn’t walking away from me anymore. He had ceased his limping locomotion and even more than that, he had turned to face me. I grimaced through the whirling dust between him and me and gazed upon his dark silhouette, cast menacingly by the sun that seemed to at once rise above him to its most oppressive apex and again behind him as though it were his second in a duel I was fated to accept and doomed to lose.

***

“Next time you do it yourself or the bullet stays in.” Tears still trickled down the thin gaunt of my cheeks while steam rose from the freshly sealed wound. The bullet catcher walked off with a disappointed scowl. I drew in quick shallow breaths, unable to fill my lungs for the deep bruise tattooed on my sternum. I thought about the life of a bullet catcher, about the impossibility of the job description, about how many bullets would find their home in the soft flesh of my body, about how many I would have to dig out from my skin. I imagined every other painful action that defined a person who catches bullets—I thought of every bullet I would catch, dodge and miss before meeting with the final one that would make all those other painful, unenviable actions impossible or unneeded. I rolled over on my side, clutching my shoulder, whimpering quietly to myself, lamenting the inevitability of bullets.