Tuesday's Child
an excerpt

Craig’s weapons were kept in a steel lock box in the back shed, the ammunition kept separate on a high shelf, with the shed itself locked to keep out what Craig termed ‘undesirables’ – in this case, the undesirables were Taylor and her cousins. The key that Craig had brought from his office matched the lock on the shed – iron, heavy and blackened by age.

“I won’t be letting you shoot with the real ammunition,” Craig said as he fit the key in the lock and twisted it. The lock popped open, and Craig unhooked it from the shed door. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, because I do, but bullets are expensive. Wait here.” With those words he walked into the shed, coming out with his rifle and a plastic zip-lock bag full of what looked like ball bearings. He locked the shed again behind him and pocketed the key. “I’ll assume to know how to load one of these.” He raised the rifle just slightly.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. I’m going to go and see if there are some empty Coke cans in the kitchen that haven’t been recycled – you can use those for target practise. Don’t load the rifle while I’m not here.”

Taylor guessed that her father had found the requisite Coke cans, because he emerged from the house with a cardboard box that was absolutely full of them. The sheer number of them surprised Taylor momentarily – she knew her family went through Coke like it was going out of fashion (in fact, part of the grocery shopping that was done every Friday was three 24-can boxes of Coke), but it still shocked her. For her part, she hated the stuff, so none of this was her doing.

“What have you been using for target practise at school?” Craig asked as they walked out to the side paddock.

“I don’t know what they are exactly, but Professor Winchester calls them little demons,” Taylor replied. “They look like Darth Maul out of the Star Wars movies.”

They reached their destination, and Craig took the box over to the fence. He took three cans from the box and set one atop each of the three nearest fence posts, before coming back to where his daughter stood.

“Now, show me how you load a rifle,” Craig instructed. He watched with a critical eye as Taylor loaded the rifle with one of the small ball bearing-esque objects the way she had been taught at school, raised the rifle to her shoulder, sighted along the barrel, and pulled the trigger. Seconds later, the ball bearing hit the Coke can dead centre and fell off the fence post. The other two cans, once Taylor had reloaded the rifle a couple of times, followed their brother in short order.

“Would you look at that,” Craig said as he examined each of the Coke cans Taylor had fired at. On each can, the ‘o’ in ‘Coke’ had a hole right through the middle. “You’re good, kid. You’re very good.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

By the time they went in for dinner, Taylor had riddled just about every one of those cans with holes. While Craig went to put the rifle and leftover ball bearings back in the shed, Taylor collected up all the cans she had fired at and put them back in the box, before carrying it over to the recycling bin outside the back door of the house and tipping the cans in.

The next morning, as was usual for Easter, Taylor was woken up by someone jumping up and down on her bed. She lifted her head up off of her pillow and cracked an eye open.

“Lemme ‘lone,” she mumbled, squinting against the bright sunlight flooding the room she shared with two of her cousins.

“The Easter Bunny came!” Annabel squealed right in Taylor’s ear.

“‘Bel, there’s no such thing as the Easter Bunny,” Taylor mumbled. Her cousin’s next words, laced with shock and disappointment, made her wake right up.

“There’s not?”

Taylor sat up and pulled Annabel across to sit in her lap. “No, there’s no Easter Bunny. You know why?” Annabel shook her head. “Have you ever seen any bunnies around here?”

“No.”

“That’s because Grandpop shoots ‘em all. They went through a different Easter Bunny every year before they realised that Grandpop Addison was shooting them all before they got a chance to give kids their chocolate. So you know what they decided to use instead? Bilbies.”

“What’s a bilby?”

“It looks like a bunny, but it’s littler than one. That means they can sneak through our fence and give us our Easter eggs, and Grandpop’s not going to shoot them. Okay?”

“Okay!” Annabel gave Taylor a big smile before scrambling off the bed. As soon as she got out into the hallway, she started yelling, “Grandpop, Taylor said you shot the Easter Bunny!”