Chekhov's Gun

Hey.

He found it when he was twelve years old, in the alley behind the high school, between the faded yellow and the gray garage's. It lay, cold and glinting in the foot high weeds, form concealed, alluring in its mystery.
It was a cool day, mid October at its finest, and he lingered, as was his wont, in the alley after school. His was an early-start school, and let out a half hour before Selby High, and he would spend some of that precious cushion each day that he thought he could get away with it, basking in the lambent glow of the older kids. He would kick down the alley, a detective recreating the scene over the lunch period; here is where they passed a bowl, there were three of them today, there several sat in a circle, behind those trash cans she applied lipstick and left behind a stained napkin, in the crotch of a tree someone left their other backpack, the one with the bible and the porno mag.
The alley was short, screened from the school by an overgrown chain link fence, and stretching two blocks of back yards to terminate in the valley where the train tracks ran. It was in the valley that he usually found the most interesting things, broken bottles and crushed cans blackened but unburnt, resting in the damp leavings of furtive fires. IT was there that he uncovered condom wrappers and a folding knife, and once a music box.
On that day he didn't make it to the valley, on the day Chekhov found the gun he carried it straight home. It was heavy, in the shoe box beneath his bed, and sometimes he thought it loud in its resting, so he muffled it, wrapped it in a nest of tissue paper. It weighed on his brain, from time to time, vulgar and dangerous, and he took to fidgeting with it when his father had gone to work and his mom was not yet home, and he had the run of the apartment.
It was loaded, that was practically the first thing he checked, when he was sure that he was home free. Nine bullets rested atop a coiled spring, and one perched, waiting, in the chamber. After he figured out how, he always made sure to leave the safety on.
So it went, for years he hid it, under the mattress, in the closet of his dorm room, behind the painting of the fish in his first apartment. He never told anyone about the gun, never took classes to learn to fire it, only pulled the trigger maybe a half dozen times, and those with it scrupulously unloaded.
There was a phase one summer, and one day the following year after his girlfriend left him, when he liked to empty the gun, carefully counting the bullets, and upon reaching ten he would set the gun to his temple, or swallow the barrel, and he would close his eyes and pull the trigger and listen to the hammer snap closed on an empty chamber. The echo of that hammer fall would stay with him for days or weeks afterwards, and the feel of the barrel shuddering slightly under the impact, and he fantasized about what it would feel like if he ever miscounted.
He had trouble, later in life, with long term girlfriends, long term friend friends and even transitory lovers. The gun was his guilty secret, his premonition, his prophecy, and his security blanket. He could not tolerate the thought of it being found, for it could then be taken from him, but no more could he embrace it, find the sensuality in its perfect iron curves.
One day, he knew, the hammer would fall on a chamber not emptied. It would strike a spark that would touch a tightly packed disk of explosive powder which would rapidly expand, driving before it a finger of lead. A gleaming brass jacket would be spat from the racking slide, and where it fell it would leave a mark, a tiny burn.
The bullet would make a larger mark by far, and that would be what he left behind. From the moment he discerned the nature of his gleaming prize he did not question that it would fire. It was the rule after all, and that it would be the defining moment of his life was a truth both freeing and fearful.