Birthright
By
Ryan Colley
Chapter One
The last evening was unremarkable in the way tragedies almost always are.
I was eight years old and the weather had settled into that March drizzle that softens everything; the rain threaded the windows, hissed on the conservatory roof and turned the air inside the house heavy and warm.
Mom was out – at work, I think – and Dad and I were left to fill the quiet between teatime and bedtime with television and toy cars on the carpet.
The smell of onions still hung in the kitchen.
The television flickered blue over the room.
Dad sat in his chair with a packet of cigarettes within reach and an ashtray already full, his attention fixed somewhere over my shoulder rather than on the sitcom we weren’t really watching.
At the time, I only half-noticed the way his gaze kept drifting to the back garden.
He would answer me a beat too late, as if a radio transmission had to cross some distance I couldn’t fathom.
When I asked him to pass the remote, he blinked, looked down at it as if surprised to find it in his hand, and chuckled like I’d said something terribly clever.
He ruffled my hair, fingers rough and slightly damp, and I smelled washing-up liquid and stale tobacco and a trace of something metallic I couldn’t place.
Outside, the garden was a dark rectangle; beyond that, the silhouette of the shed was just visible when the rain let up.
“I’m just going out to the shed for a bit,” he said, standing up. His tone was entirely ordinary; if anything, it carried the relief of a man slipping into routine. “You’ll be all right in here until Mom gets home?”
Something in the way he said it made me look up.
There was something in the way he waited for me to answer, his eyes slightly too wide, like he was trying to memorise my face.
I nodded because eight-year-olds are endlessly agreeable.
He held my shoulder for a moment longer, the pressure both comforting and alien, told me he loved me, and then he went to the back door.
I remember thinking he looked bulky under his jacket, as though he was hiding something, but then he was pulling the door open and letting in a ribbon of cold, damp air, and I turned back to the television.
The shed light blinked on a second later, a single yellow rectangle hovering in the dark.
He’d left a half-finished crossword on the armrest. I pushed cars across the carpet.
Yet, as the minutes eked out, a strange awareness crept in.
The canned laughter on the television grew hysterical in the stillness; the ticking clock seemed suddenly very loud.
I kept glancing at the back door as if expecting Dad to appear, smiling apologetically for being so long.
The small hands on the novelty kitchen clock moved with glacial slowness.
Somewhere in the garden, a fox barked and made me jump. I’d become aware of how alone I was.
The sound, when it came, was nothing like I’d ever heard and exactly like I will remember forever. It filled the house like a thunderclap fills a valley, a percussive slap that seemed to push the air through me.
For a split second, I thought something had fallen over in the kitchen – some heavy dish sliding off its shelf perhaps, or that someone had slammed the back gate too hard.
Then the silence that followed revealed itself as a different kind of noise, the absence of one world replaced by the birth of another. Everything felt muted in comparison.
***
It was cold when I stepped out. I hadn’t thought to put on my shoes – that’s something Mom and Dad told me to do – so my socks soaked up rainwater and mud, and the shock of that went through my whole body.
The wet grass came up over my ankles. The smell of damp earth was sharp and almost sweet.
Through the gloom, the shed’s window glowed a dim sulphur yellow, the door hanging slightly ajar.
That little sliver of light spilling onto the lawn was the straightest line I had ever seen.
The wooden door rasped when I pushed it.
The interior smelled of soil and oil and something else that would, years later, return to me in the middle of supermarket aisles and office lifts: the thick iron-rich scent of fresh blood.
At first, my mind didn’t register the scene in its entirety.
The shed was the same small, cluttered space it had always been.
Dad was there, sitting on the folding chair he used for carving, his head bowed forward in the way men sit when checking something in their lap.
For a second, I thought he had spilt paint across his shirt.
I remember noticing the same paint made up the wall behind him, except this paint had texture and glistened in the bare bulb light.
His right slipper was off and lay on its side under the bench, the plaid fabric darkening as it absorbed what dripped from his knee.
His hands were in his lap and, between them, lay something heavy and dark that seemed part of him and yet not.
When I stepped closer, I saw the way that one side of his head no longer existed in any recognisable shape.
There were shards of bone embedded in the plywood wall.
His jaw sagged, teeth exposed in the way people only ever show teeth in nightmares.
On the concrete floor, a tooth lay by the leg of the chair, a small white thing that in any other context would have belonged under my pillow.
Only one of his eyes was left. It was open and fixed on something that had never been there.
Flies had not had time to gather, though one bluebottle did tap against the window glass as if impatient to get inside.
I remember that sound more than I remember my own breath – the soft, persistent thudding of insect against glass.
I didn’t understand that he was dead – what kid understands death at that age?
I knew that the thing between his hands mattered because it seemed heavier than anything else in the shed.
It was coated in blood and, yet, it gleamed.
There was still smoke in the air, a faint grey coil rising from the muzzle of it, mingling with the sharper smell of burnt propellant.
I looked at it as long as I looked at his ruined face, as though by staring long enough, I could convince it to become something else.
“Dad?”
Chapter Two
Years softened some of the images, but never that final one. When I came home from work thirteen years later to find Mom sitting at the kitchen table with the pistol laid out in front of her like a loaf of bread, my body reacted before my brain did.
I hung my coat on the peg by the door and stamped my boots on the mat as if those rituals might summon normality. The dim light over the cooker hood cast everything in the yellowish pallor of the last thing at night.
“Long day?” Mom asked without lifting her hands from her lap.
She didn’t look at the gun, though her posture suggested she could feel its presence as surely as if it were a candle flame.
I nodded and shrugged. I still lived at home, working days in an office, drifting through evenings with the sound turned down low.
It was easier to be sardonic than sincere.
The pistol was smaller than it appeared in my nightmares and larger than it had any right to be.
Dark blued steel dulled with age, scuffed wooden grips whose varnish had been worn smooth by the oil from generations of hands.
It looked like it belonged in a museum about a war no one wanted to remember.
Mom had placed it on a tea towel as if to protect the table.
She sat with her hands clenched together, the skin across her knuckles shiny.
For years, she had kept that thing wrapped in a shoe box in the wardrobe, alongside old photographs and cancelled cheques.
Now it lay between us like a third presence.
“What’s going on, Mom?” I asked, eyes locked on the gun. She took in a deep breath, as if to recite something she’d memorised.
“It was your father’s,” Mom said. “And your uncle’s before him. And your granddad’s before that. As much as I hated having this in the house since that day, he always thought it should stay in the family.”
“Fucked up kinda heirloom,” I joked. She didn’t laugh.
“I don’t want to give it to you,” she added. “But it was never mine to decide, and this is your birthright.”
She pushed it towards me; I picked it up and held it like it could go off at any moment. I didn’t know what else to do.
It was heavier than I had imagined. Cold travelled through my skin into the bones of my hand. The smell was immediate: oil, iron, the faint tang of burnt powder. The steel left a residue on my fingertips that was not visible but felt like knowledge.
“I would love for you to get rid of it. Donate it. Scrap it. Put it in an amnesty box,” she explained. She looked older than her years in that moment, exhausted in a way that couldn’t be slept away. “Just promise me you won’t … you won’t …”
“I’m not planning on anything,” I laughed, but the words came out softer than intended. She shook her head as if to clear a thought, then left the kitchen. I was alone with it again, for the first time since that day all those years ago.
I carried the gun upstairs to my room, laid it on the desk, and continued to stare at it. Curiosity dressed itself as pragmatism.
If that thing had to remain in the house, I told myself, I ought to know how to make it safe.
I ejected the magazine and saw that it was empty. I pulled back the slide and checked the chamber. It fit so naturally in my grip that, for a moment, I forgot it hadn’t always been mine. That thought unsettled me enough to put it back down, but the impression lingered on my palm like a bruise.
***