Baltimore’s favorite softball slugger/novelist, Michael Kimball, has a new book out called Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (On a Postcard) and can be purchased from Mud Luscious Press (http://mudlusciouspress.com/books/.) The book collects 300 brief biographies of real people, written as part of a project that started five years ago as a piece of performance art during the Transmodern Festival (http://transmodernfestival.com). While you wait for your copy to come in the mail, What Lit is pleased to tide you over with an excerpt from his most recent novel, Big Ray, published last year.
Playing Soldier
By Michael Kimball
I used to ask my father if he ever shot the enemy when he was in the Marines. He usually wouldn’t answer, but sometimes he would explain to me that it was war and it wasn’t like what happened on television. Then my father would get one of his rifles out of the closet and lay it into my open hands. He showed me how to hold the butt of the rifle against my shoulder and let me look through the scope as long as I didn’t put my finger on the trigger.
**
For years, I would put on all-green clothes and play soldier. I went on top secret missions in the backyard. I took cover in the bushes and the shrubs and in the tall weeds at the back of our lot. I protected the house from neighbors and trees and falling leaves. I protected the house from people walking by on the sidewalk and cars and trucks driving by on the street.
**
Once, I was playing soldier with my father’s rifle in the living room. I had already sighted the lamp through the scope and then the television when I noticed my father had fallen asleep. I pointed the rifle at him and his face got huge. I centered the crosshairs between his eyes, but I didn’t slip my finger off the guard and onto the trigger. Instead, I just mouthed, Bang.
**
After that, I started to imagine different ways my father might be killed. I imagined my father falling asleep while driving and dying in a car accident. I imagined him going through the windshield and being beheaded.
**
I imagined my father getting shot and killed in a hunting accident, then being left out there in the woods.
**
I imagined my father out fishing on a boat that was sinking and my father not being able to swim. I imagined my father thrashing in the water and then the water being still.
**
After reading about Gary Gilmore in the newspaper, I imagined my father getting shot and killed by a firing squad. I imagined each of the bullets hitting him and his body slumping against the wall.
**
At some point, my mother told me my father had never served in any war, had never been in any kind of combat, had never fired his rifle at anything besides a target. My mother told me my father had never shipped out, that the only fighting he ever engaged in was at home.
**
