Daniel Dagris’s work in progress memoir, Dear Hunter, is about growing up poor in Southwest Washington. Much as I’m looking forward to it, I’ll have to wait; currently he’s focusing more on short fiction. His short stories have appeared in Orca, Maudlin House, Open Ceilings, and other journals (links available on his website). Toronto-based Feels Magazine published a portion of his memoir in its Eulogy issue. His short story “Heavenly Body” dropped at Portland Review … today!
Daniel has been a member of Chuck Palahniuk’s workshop for the last couple years, and last month his short story Wolven was recommended by Best Horror of the Year.
Meanwhile, here’s a brief sample from his memoir. He has used this excerpt in live performance at venues such as Telltale.
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The Common Gun
When I was six, and living in Las Vegas, my eleven-year-old cousin said, “Come here. I want to show you something.” That something was the gun in his parents’ closet. “They don't know I know about it,” he said.
The next year we moved to Winlock, Washington. A small country town where guns are like tractors: Anybody who uses the word “property” when referring to their home probably has one. A friend of the family had a room full of guns. My brothers and I shot some of them when I was twelve. We started with an anti-aircraft mortar, which looked like a steel tube that was held at your side, hands at waist level, by two horizontal handles. Nobody gave me ear protection before handing it to me. The last thing I heard before moments of nothing was that the gun was engineered to have no kick at all. The instant I fired it, the world went mute. I heard no birds, wind, cars in the distance, or even that tinnitus ringing common in war movies. Behind me, dads and their sons lay on the ground, elbows in the grass, covering their ears with both hands. The bullet was the length of my twelve-year-old forearm. We shot them into the lawn so they wouldn't rain down on people in the next town over.
Next, I shot a revolver which had so much kick that it made me understand why cowboys miss so often in movies. That gun was my nine-year-old brother’s favorite. Last, I shot an AK forty-something. I don’t know if it was legal or illegal. But I was allowed to shoot it without supervision, in the front yard, clipping blossoms off dandelions across the street. When a car drove by, I pointed the gun skyward, but then lowered it and kept shooting after they passed. Recently I’ve wondered why they didn’t call the police. “Yes, I’d like to report reckless gun use. What did they look like? Um, a child soldier?... Hello?”
My stepdad borrowed a rifle from that arsenal to kill one of the many deer that used to wander through our yard, eating from our garden and apple trees. We lived within city limits. He didn’t have a hunting license. His plan was to only fire one shot, so even if the police came looking, they wouldn’t be able to triangulate his location. He pulled it off. I knew as soon as I saw the severed head of a doe in the grass beside the back porch after walking home from elementary school. My stepfather never gave the gun back. For the next six years it stayed in our hall closet. Moments out of reach as he threatened suicide and familicide, while shouting himself hoarse almost daily. “I’ll take you all out with me.” he said, so often I lost count.
After college, I spent half a year living twenty minutes from Tombstone, Arizona. One afternoon my girlfriend and I drank at the Four Deuces Saloon and then walked over to a buckaroo-themed shooting range. I felt buzzed, but my accuracy was unreal. Firing a long barrel Colt, I shot my target in the chest, head, and neck. Having had such success with the first five shots, I fired the last bullet into the silhouette’s crotch.
“Well, you're just a bad person,” said the old cowpoke running the joint.
When people say that guns are too normalized in this country, I think to myself, “I don’t have that much experience with guns." A thought closely followed by “Oh, that’s exactly what normalized means.”
Image: Untitled, by Peter Solarz
Love this, Mead. Learning so much.