PARENTAL GUIDANCE

Her father, who always dawned a beaten, worn out Redwings cap, taught her how to shoot. Taught her what to shoot & when to do it, but when kids ask about the lever-action repeating rifle she keeps on the terrace, she tells the children its only for decoration, like Christmas lights or Halloween pumpkins. But every night she finds herself sitting out there, rifle in hand, liquid silver shells loaded & ready.

Of course, werewolves aren’t real; messy cross breeds of human fear & malign imaginings, but the vivified dead though, they are very real. They, like the mythical beast which is modeled after them, are deathly allergic to silver & hopeless slaves to moon cycles, but not the cycles of Earths moon. No, they bend to the will of Eukelade, that tiny, seldom harolded Jovian moon, caught in the hands of a thoughtless giant. Its ability to alter human mental & physical states is grossly amplified by its father planets massive magnetic field.

The vivified dead only rise when the flat side of the non spherical satellite faces Earth, which has come about more often over the recent years. Her own father was taken & doomed to the cureless meanderings of those poor, hunger driven wretches & she knows that one day, her father, far removed from his right mind will lumber his magnetically augmented body into her sights. But could she really kill him? Murder a good man? Maybe the last good man on the planet?

Yes. She could.

Yes she will. Its what he’d want. He was already dead anyway.

Its what he’d do if the shoe had fallen in the other direction.

When he turned, his old Redwings cap, worn & faded passed its glory days, was the last bit of his humanity that held on. She knew what to do when she saw it again.

And as it came, around the block & up the street, atop the head of this once great man, tears, molten lead flowing down cheeks of the fairest amber, fell onto the rifles cherry wood stock as she took her lethal aim.