Accomplishment

More about Accomplishment

Inspired by
https://deepdreamgenerator.com/ddream/rs0s7p8wgka

The universe was a large basket of different colours of yarn. Her halo was its map. It showed the past fourteen billion years and a certain July 7th in the deep future, when everything would become warm honey.

The pralaya.

Even the basket.

The town stood on both sides of her, doing the usual things towns do while waiting for a circus to leave.

As a child, she had no interest in toy guns. She had her grandfather’s long-barrelled, engraved revolver. She began with cans, then paper targets. Eventually, the holes in the paper began to look like little mouths saying the same thing.

A cousin came home from a war somewhere. The somewhere seemed to have followed him home. He told her about soldiers learning to shoot at flying coins with air pistols. For a week, nobody hit anything. Then one man did. The next day, two did. Soon everybody could.

Somebody suggested flies.

Somebody else said that was cruel.

She liked that somebody else.

She rescued spiders from bathtubs. She moved slugs and worms off sidewalks. Ants continued their errands beneath her carefully placed shoes. She had no wish to kill anything. She was interested in the peculiar friendship between attention and a moving object.

Without telling her cousin, she practised. After a month, she could knock coins out of the air. Money briefly became something other than money.

Later, there were cigarettes shot from mouths. People applauded with the hands they had been worrying with.

When the circus arrived, she took the ringmaster behind a building and showed him what she could do.

He offered her a job.

That was how she came to travel from town to town, making small metal objects change their minds in the air.

But marksmanship was only the occupation written beside her name.

At night, after the applause had gone home inside other people, she sat among her coloured balls of yarn. A cat slept with one paw on a blue strand. The strand passed across her wrist, and beneath the skin were other threads: fine channels carrying sensations she could feel but could not name.

Her halo turned quietly behind her.

She wondered what the final target might be. Not the smallest or the farthest away. Something she had been aiming at before her grandfather was born.

The cat woke and pulled the blue yarn.

An orange ball moved on the other side of the basket.

She watched it roll against her foot.

For a while, she forgot to look for the target. The room was there, with the cat and the basket and the revolver in its case. She could hear somebody outside taking down the tent.

She got up to help.