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I stand to the left of my younger brother. We stand at similar height with similar mannerisms and almost identical mumbling voices.

Moving up and away from me is a “clay pigeon”. A round disk that gets smaller and more elliptical as it rises, like a small eye squinting at me across the horizon.

I follow this artificially orange and black disk up along its arch over the tree line and fire when I see it reach its apex.

The stock of the gun cuts into my shoulder on the recoil and the disk starts to fall.

My brother fires.

He hits it.

We do this again, and again, and again.

I follow the artificially orange and black disk up along its arch over the tree line and fire when I see it reach its apex.

The stock of the cuts into my shoulder on the recoil and the disk starts to fall.

My brother fires.

He hits it.

My brother and I have never shot anything living. We have hunted squirrel once, and he has killed a few small animals, but we have never brought home a deer or anything. My mother hates it, she has even come up with beautiful names like Jake, and Clayton for us when we use and talk of firearms.

I follow the artificially orange and black disk up along its arch over the tree line and fire when I see it reach its apex.

The stock of the cuts into my shoulder on the recoil and the disk starts to fall.

My brother fires.

He hits it.

We shoot because it is something no one else really wants to do in our family. This way we do not have to share each other with the others we love, and we don’t have to talk about it. It is also fun, manly, dangerous, stupid, all that stuff.

When we do this we are not physically close, in fact its dangerous to stand too close to one another. Instead, we have a doubling of intimacy in that we eventually find a rhythm between us, and share an underlying sense of irreversible mortal danger we put each other in as we stand together and hold firearms.

Following this logic of intimacy if we were to place the shotgun between us, stock in his chest, barrel in mine we would have just enough room to link hands if we reached out (but we would never do such a thing).

I follow the artificially orange and black disk up along its arch over the tree line and fire when I see it reach its apex.

The stock of the cuts into my shoulder on the recoil and the disk starts to fall.

My brother fires.

He hits it.

I blink when I shoot, a pre-wound in reaction to the eventuality of the projectile. Reciprocally, the clay disk winks back at me when it is erased by a shot. It’s purpose is to die, to be shattered into pieces unfixable. It’s a mortal disk, and it reminds me that I am as well and that the gun I hold is designed to deliver any and all targets to their immediate death.

I follow the artificially orange and black disk up along its arch over the tree line and fire when I see it reach its apex.

The stock of the cuts into my shoulder on the recoil and the disk explodes into nothingness.

It is almost as if by following this disk with my eyes enough I have destroyed it. I have traced it’s path to meaninglessness and then obliterated it with my vision.

There is a profound difference between looking and shooting, but one is a sibling of the other. While shooting destroys the thing being looked at, looking claims it out of the world. Even when I follow the disk across the sky with my eyes and miss with the shot, I have taken it. I have marked it as separate from all things by choosing it, and conversely marked my self with that choice, similar to the sound of the shot, or the smell of gunpowder. Both are after-images of the shot.

in arms

my brother's H&R Pardner 12 gauge shotgun, chamber reducers, conduit, ink jet backlight film, LEDs