Here’s the gun shop doorbell. Doesn’t work right, muted by electrical tape where it was re-adhered to its mount. It clicks. It doesn’t ring. Click, click, click, and on. Clicks that start slow and assertive then taper off like a marble bouncing on the floor. It doesn’t work right but it’s still hanging there, making sound. Working, just not right.
Click, click, click, tapering off to nothing.
Click, click, click, tapering off to nothing.
Over and over, six days out of every week. So much ringing that its mount came apart last week and the bell fell down to the floor and sounded like any other piece of metal and then the shop owner repaired it with tightly stretched electrical tape he ripped off the roll with his teeth.
Click, click, click, tapering off to nothing. Another busy day today. Still making sound, just not right.
Here’s a black backpack on the bedroom floor. Two pouches, one fat faulty zipper on the smaller of the two, functional, but tedious enough to zip that it gets left open like a pocket, even though it’s a pouch for a reason.
Here’s the backpack sitting with other bedroom floor things like it does when it’s here, with piles of the same clothing that it sits with every day, mostly. Mostly sitting with clothing, but also with some crumpled wrappers and bits of food, a few toy things, a BB gun rifle leaning against the corner wall next to the backpack as if to guard its contents.
The most fickle of the backpack’s contents, wrapped in a blue track team t-shirt, and zipped in every night before being removed in the morning, hides here unlike the other backpack items in the other backpacks at the bus stop or on the bus or in the school. And this morning, like many other mornings, might be the morning it won’t be removed before the backpack is taken to school.
Here’s a lizard. Up and down, lizard. Pushing up and down on a river rock to show the sun to his underside. Blue belly like a robin’s egg. Tail hanging on by a thread. But then moving. Over, beneath, over, up, beneath. Then across and onto radiant black pavement under the warm sun.
Close by, a piercing of sound into the sky. Big and sudden. Edged. Then a new sound. Wavering and animal. Muffled by walls.
Head turning one way and back, lizard. Frozen. Looking. Tongue slips out.
Not a bird: a child running. Frozen, lizard. One single child out from the sharp sounding building, running, child, running from where the sharp sound went, from the sometimes of wavering animal voices, running. The child’s steps echo gigantic overhead, so the lizard darts, almost out of frozen time, back for the river rock and beneath in cold stillness.
It’s still.
Then: a dull rock on rock sound, maybe right on top, lizard. But he doesn’t dart out, now fear and instinct in competition, and a clank of dense metal drops into the same rocks almost at the same time as feet against metal loops, against hollow metal posts, join the chorus of voices from the building.
Child’s feet become fading thumps on turf away into the trees. Gone, child.
Wait in the cold shade, lizard. Then over, beneath, over, up, beneath, and back across again to lift his belly up and down over the hot black pavement, vigilant for birds.
Here’s a .32 caliber, buried in the river rocks. Can’t even catch the moonlight glint. What a shame. Chrome plated special edition. This gun was meant for shooting, not lying in the earth. This gun was made to display, not to hide away. Arm. Firearm. Made to augment the human hand. Now fallow. Disarmed. Dismembered. What a shame.
Here’s an evidence room full of clear plastic bags and clear plastic bins on metal shelves.
The oldest bags and bins are labeled with faded black permanent marker on laminated paper tags, attached by short twists of plastic-wrapped wire through hole-punched holes, or taped with yellowing clear tape.
The next oldest have printed thin plastic zip-tied tags — even the bins are zip-tied — in one of three colors: blue, yellow, red.
The newest bags and bins are labeled with printed barcodes on thick rubberized stickers, and the very newest of those, in clear plastic bags, contain a backpack and a crumpled page and a zipper tab and a shirt.
Two-pouch black backpack in a medium-large clear heavy-duty plastic zipper bag on a galvanized steel shelf in a locked room where one fluorescent light is always left on and buzzing.
#8 gauge zipper pull tab in an extra-small clear light-duty bag lined up neatly next to the backpack on the same shelf.
Blue track team t-shirt folded so the white screenprint logo reading Fullerman Middle Movers and Shakers in a semicircle around a lizard in boxing gloves shows through its medium bag next to the zipper’s.
Then a small light-duty bag with a balled sheet of wide-ruled paper, loose spiral shreds where it tore from its notebook pressed like a suffocated flower against the inside of the bag.
Adam Nesbit is workshopping NMU’s MFA and co-leads Shorts at Passages North. He’s a homeschooled wildland firefighting public school teacher who grew up in a cult. Probably at some point he was going to try writing.
Beautiful imagery and use of language in this one.