Excerpt from

By Himself
By
Allison Landa

himself

You bought the gun at Longs Drugs, where Pleasant Valley becomes Fifty-First. It’s the big Longs, the twenty-four hour one with toys and construction paper and clothes and fabric and tampons, Advil on one aisle and dog contraptions on the other, and you can’t even guess how many nights you’ve spent safe and secure, walking down those alleys lined with everything the world has to offer, that plus bags of Cheetos. You read there and no one tells you not to, no one says it’s not a library so move it kid, leave that book for the person who’s going to pay for it. You’ve read the books that are supposed to make you feel better and the Danielle Steel books with glittery covers.

Your mom read those in the bathroom and sometimes you heard her in there crying. Other times she’d go out and smoke by the pool, the pool which never got finished because your folks didn’t have enough cash, so it became a hole in the ground and a reason for them to fight. Your family forgot why they started digging in the first place. The house got sold eventually and the real estate guy just kept shaking his head, like he was saying these folks don’t know what they’re doing and no, your folks didn’t.

You bought the gun in the toy aisle. There was a young kid out with his parents, the dad black and the mom Latina, one of these Oakland specials your parents would say but you don’t mind, you don’t discriminate. You like how mixed this place is, how it keeps the eyes off you, how it makes you feel human. You didn’t buy the gun because you wanted to die, you bought it because you wanted to feel what it was like to have a barrel pushed against your face, in your mouth, and it might as well be a toy because you weren’t actually going to use it. You just wanted to know what it was like to feel so close, and you knew your imagination could take over, and really, that’s been your problem all along.

carolann

I haven’t always thought he was my smartest client, but recently I’ve changed my mind. I’ve been his caseworker going on five years now and for the first six months he barely said a thing, just came into my office and looked around, and that frustrated me because, you know, I’m human. I’d try to pull him out, say things, provoke him a bit even, but nothing opened him up. The day he said something to me, Charley and I’d gotten into a big fight, I mean just massive, and I’d come to work red-eyed and mascara-stained. He came in and he was holding one of those gone-to-seed dandelions that you see in spring, the kind the kids pull out of the ground and then make a wish and puff, blow away the fluff, and he held it over my desk and made like he was going to blow but didn’t, and somewhere I just smiled.

You’re pretty, he said. It wasn’t a hit-on-you sort of thing, I know the difference. It was a statement of what he considered fact, and after he left that day I picked up the phone and called Charley, and we laughed, and whatever we’d fought about that day puffed off like that dandelion’s fluff.

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