by August Edwards
A gun shooting several shots outside woke up my dad. Alarmed, he went to the back balcony. Balcony makes it sounds like a certain kind of way. The view is of an alley and a parking lot. Actually, multiple parking lots—one which belongs to his apartment, one belongs to a bank, and a few adjacent municipal lots. So it looks like one big disjointed lot. Plus, this is in Turlock, and if you’ve been there, you might understand how at 3AM, the humid manure smell is at its summit. That farmland smell is so strong it wakes me up if I’ve fallen asleep with my window open. This is the balcony ambiance. Now I’ve set the scene. After the shots, my dad saw a man on the ground fighting for what would be his final gasps of breath, of life. This year, similar to the year before, and the year before that, California would have nearly 1,500 gun homicides. My dad yelled—David! David! David! He thought the dying man was his neighbor, David, who’s a young guy, and at around this time on weekends David moves cones from the apartment parking lot. David has to do that because Robert—the property manager and property resident—doesn’t want anybody to park in his parking lot. So, dad has this image of David losing his life all because he’s doing Robert’s bidding. Robert: shirtless year-round; can’t hardly walk much less trek the stairs; doesn’t have any teeth; sexually harasses his caregivers, asks them how they feel about oral sex, sends photos of his genitals. Robert has cameras all over the property. He sees everything that happens around the complex. He knows when I am walking up the stairs to visit my dad before my dad knows. He sees every person who passes by his truck in the parking lot. He saw the man shot, fall over, gasp for life. He knew what happened before the bullets even came out. While my dad called for David, thinking it was David, dying, Robert exerted every ounce of strength he could to shuffle out. All that evidence on his monitors. The murder he just watched. In happier times we joke about his monitor setup. Like he’s living out his TV fantasies. On watching the shooting, Robert would say it was just like watching a Western, his favorite genre. So. David had been sleeping in his apartment and heard my dad calling for him. Woke up, came out. “Call the police, David,” my dad said to the ghost.
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AUGUST EDWARDS lives in the Midwest. She holds an MFA from San Francisco State University. You can find her work in Albuquerque Green Room, Word West Revue, Mulberry Literary, Hard Noise, and elsewhere.
Union Spring Literary Review 