Gutshot by Amelia Gray Page B

welled around his hands and soaked his shirt. “I’m gutshot!” he said.
    The man who had shot him lowered his weapon. “That is definitely what I intended to happen,” he said, “but now that it’s happened, I feel things have gone too far.”
    The gutshot man drove to a hospital. “Doctor, I’m gutshot!” the man said.
    “This is terrible,” the doctor said. “Wow. What are we going to do?”
    “I hoped you would know.”
    “It has been many years since I practiced medicine. They let me stay here. Soon they will name a surgical ward after me, where men who are gutshot can be cared for.”
    The doctor drove them to the home where the gutshot man’s mother lived. “Mother, I’m gutshot!” he cried.
    “My sweetheart!” his mother said. “Woe descends upon us all!”
    “I’m not sure it’s as bad as all that,” the man said.
    “Upon the beginning and the last end, view only the comfort of darkness!”
    “He seems to be pulling together,” said the doctor, who had returned with a set of towels to stanch the blood.
    “All ye who pass through these walls and halls will know only pain through the end of days! Please don’t use the guest towels.”
    “We’re going to go sit outside,” the man said.
    The doctor helped the man to a place behind the house where an elm tree made a bed of fallen leaves. “Good luck,” the doctor said, climbing over a fence and running for the road.
    “Jesus Christ, I’m gutshot,” the man said.
    “Well, now I won’t help you,” Jesus Christ said. He was seated on a low branch. The bottoms of his sandals gently brushed the man’s forehead. “It speaks to a lack of respect, you know.”
    “Truly?”
    “Just kidding. I love you. I also love the man who gutshot you and I love what you’re doing to those guest towels.”
    “Will you help me?”
    “Oh, sure. Do you see that airplane up there?”
    Jesus Christ pointed until the man saw a silver glint in the sky.
    “The people in that plane are flying to Dallas,” Jesus Christ said. “There is an old woman who feeds the stray cats in her neighborhood, and a dentist, and a little baby who will grow up to be in asset management. There is a pilot who loves the smell of masking tape and a woman who doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life and will eventually stop wondering.”
    “And they’re all going to Dallas.”
    “Does that help?”
    The man leaned against the tree trunk. His vision flared and blurred. “I think so,” he said.

 
     
    How He Felt
     
    “I love this woman!” the man told the empty room. “What should I do to prove my love?”
    He bought a billboard by the main road and ascended its ladder with a can of paint and a broad brush. But the board was much larger than he had figured from the ground, and he could only reach the lower third of it.
    “I live this bath mat,” a mother read for her child as they drove by.
    The man had his message printed on a massive banner with the thought of flying it over the bay, but the pilot he hired was an inexperienced crop duster and a drunk, and he rigged the banner upside down and backward. People on the beach craned their necks to look. A pair of jet skis collided, killing three.
    He rented a movie theater, but the reels were accidentally switched and his invited guests puzzled over a sex-education video from 1964. He composed a song and taught it to a children’s choir, but they contracted food poisoning at a pizza party and spent the evening drinking Gatorade and playing video games. He wrote it into a sermon, but the pastor threw the whole thing out as sacrilege.
    Discouraged, the man drove to the site of his billboard and ascended its ladder again. At the top, he held on to the platform as the panels groaned in the wind.
    The man wanted to share. He knew that if they only understood, the population would be forever changed. He rested his head against the billboard. He heard in the protests of the steel a message from the mechanized