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  • My Only Hunting Story
  • Christopher Heffernan (bio)

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Jack Barrett. Cascading Figures. 2007. Oil on canvas. 20 x 24 inches. Courtesy of ARTicles Art Gallery.

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We were at the bar, though she had not told me to meet her. I knew she was coming to town because it was a Thursday and she had class on Thursday, but she didn't call so I checked one of the parking lots for her jeep then went over to the Lion's Head and she was there talking to the bartender Seth. She was very drunk and smiling when I came in. From how drunk she was I knew she had been there a while, but I didn't care when I saw how she looked at me. She put her arms around me and kissed me on the cheek and did not ask how I found her or why I was there but only what kind of whisky I wanted as she patted the stool next to her. I laughed and she laughed and we drank. It was later, after Seth had gone, that she said, "My father has a hunting lodge. You should come down. I'll bring you there. I always wanted to go, but there's no women. When I was little I could kind of poke around and sometimes go out there, but after I was like ten he wouldn't let me. Even now. Even though I drink with his friends." And I said, "You drink with your father's friends?" And she said, "Yeah. Some of them. They love me. We hang out. But he won't let me go on the hunting trips. But you should go. You should. Have you ever been hunting?" "No," I said. "So you've never fired a gun?" "No," I said. "It doesn't matter," she said. "He'll teach you," she said. "They're a great bunch of guys." She ordered us two more and I wondered if I could kill anything bigger than a bug and finally decided that, yeah, I could. It wouldn't be easy, but I could do it. The experience perhaps was something I needed. Something that might finish off the childish way I sometimes thought about things. "You should go," she said. "It'd be great," she said. Then she was swaying around the street and I took her keys and walked her to my place to sober her up. "I have to go home," she kept saying. "I have class in the morning and I don't have anything with me," she said. She fell asleep while I was kissing her on the couch. When she woke, she jumped up saying she had to leave and gathered her coat and shoes and bag while I told her to calm down. "My grandmother's going to be up," she said, "waiting," she said and she was out the door before I could get her keys away from her again. There were times after this, when we were naked, a few times, that she told me why her grandmother waited for her. This girl/woman who seemed mostly like the rest of us until the stories came out about drunkenly putting her car through a tree and the engine going through the passenger seat, about failing and quitting different colleges for no reason other than she didn't feel like getting up, about being brought back to life on your parents's bed by a team of EMTs with your family standing around and it's obvious to everyone you're not wearing underwear, about being in the ER again with tubes coming out of you, another car, another storefront smashed to pieces. She said her grandmother was always giving her second chances. She said she had no idea why. She didn't deserve them, she said, but now she said she was tired, that she was getting it right or at least too tired to get things so wrong. At twenty-three. Once when she stayed at my place she called her grandmother and told her she was sleeping at her friend...

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