In Close Range

In Close Range

Posted by A Great Liar

(The following is an excerpt from the currently undergoing novel, The Liar's Lobe)

1

The thing about coming back to your hometown years after you left it behind is that they are never quite the same. Not that a lot can change in ten years, not physically anyway. The only change, if any, takes place between your ears; in a solitary confinement inside your brain reserved only for memories that are meant to be locked away.

And with time, something always goes wrong there, because as you finally face up to everything that you once owned in the past long gone, none of it seem quite the way you had it remembered, in all those years you had been away.

You think you had it all figured out, but you don't; because there is a place in each of us’ brain that is ruled solely by deceit.

2

Looking at the body in the Town’s morgue, I realized how small my brother Danny looked, as if the whole of him had shrank, may be from the impact of the bullet, I am not quite sure. Because there is a lot about being shot at close range that I knew nothing about or wished to. And if I ever changed my mind, I knew there was only one way to find out; Danny’s way.

His head was heavily bandaged, strapped in white all around the temples, because the bullet had travelled its way across one temple to another, till it finally hit the part of the basement wall covered with an elaborate looking Monroe poster, splattering it with blood and everything else that decides to come out when you shoot yourself in the head in such close range, close enough to feel the muzzle against the side of your head.

Looking down on to the face, with hot tears streaming down that I had no control over, I tried to remind myself that the dead looking fella strapped in sheets didn’t look like my brother at all.

But I cried anyway, knowing that it wouldn’t help, knowing that the problem wasn’t the DNA, but my memory of it.