The Partisan
FICTION
by Conor Barnes
When I shoot a gun for the first time I drop it. It falls out of my hands. Why did you drop it? asks my father. Why did you let it fall?
I am very young and don’t know why. All I know are the birds, startled like a nightmare, flying above my father. They dive behind him and I can see them through his eyes.
The final time I shoot a gun, it’s at the end of the war. I am nearly invisible in the grass, grey on grey. My father, half-broken, is beside me. He points, silently, at movement a mile away. There are no birds.
Conor Barnes is a Canadian writer living in Halifax. His fiction and poetry have been published in White Wall Review, Literally Stories, Shirley Magazine, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, and elsewhere.
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