I don’t know fear, but I began to feel … uneasy. A new sensation, or one I’d not felt for a very long time. As if something were watching me, like prey.

I began to need the rifle with me always. Or as close to me as was feasible, which was often not quite close enough for comfort. Aside from the Pauley-related issues with this particular weapon, it was chancier now to travel with any sort of gun. Since the towers had come down in New York, there was endless trouble and shit about terrorism, and that not only in the east.

As if they really knew what terror was.

I couldn’t take the rifle into work, of course, but I did have it stashed in the trunk of my car, whenever I left the trailer park. At night I took it into my bed and caressed it there, receiving the cold bright taste of metal on my tongue.

I missed the knives I used to own, the steel blade and the stone one. A gun, by comparison, lacked intimacy. But I had lost the knives I once had claimed, cast them away, despite their numinosity. Where did they go?

Sometimes by night there came the wash and clatter of helicopter blades, circling over the rim where the town met the desert. In the silence after the chopper was gone, I felt the pressure of regard more keenly. Even through the trailer’s flimsy roof. The eye of some invisible raptor high above.