Gun Control

Jackson laid newspapers on the floor in his rec room. The pages lay there apathetically, just waiting for some chance to blow away or get stuck on a shoe; Jackson opened his ladder and put it in the center of the spread. He climbed the two rungs and put his duster on the paint ledge that angled down. The paint ledge was clearly marked as such, claiming itself Not a Step. Jackson had no intention of stepping on it.

He looked up at the ceiling fan that he intended to clean. It was disgusting. He had let it go and let it go, and the months added up- and in summer the thing had been going full-speed three-quarters of the time he was awake in the house, and half the time he was asleep. The sleeping room had to be chilled, because of his asthma. He'd been warned by some young, concerned man in the ER that he'd driven himself to the last time he attempted to sleep in a warm bedroom. The concerned man had been very clear about an avoidance of an overheated, or sometimes just heated, sleeping room; he'd been adamant about Jackson taking medications- new medications that were in addition to his old baby blue inhaler- or risking another trip to the ER. This time in an ambulance, this time not so lucky- you could die, he'd said.

Jackson supposed he was taking his life in his hands every night he didn't turn on the AC. This was every other night, a system he'd concocted to more evenly balance the load on his power sources. He enjoyed telling people how much money he saved by using the ceiling fan, but he took his new medication with great attention to the instructions on the bottle, to the point where he set an alarm on his phone that whirred at him every six hours, and he would interrupt whatever he was doing- it could be anything at all - to take the dark blue pill. He was secretly gratified that his new pills and his old inhaler matched.

The ceiling fan had not cleaned itself while he was gathering wool, Jackson thought, trying to engage his normally healthy sense of humor, but the thing irked him. It was filthy, fringed with dust on the blades, one side of each blade furred with it. He hated this chore- no, he hated this type of chore: the thankless one, the invisible one, the chore that was necessary and needed attention far more often than it ought, the one that no one saw. And worse was the  crick in the neck from looking up that needed two or three days to recover- that was just indecent. Jackson clamped his teeth together, and remembered to unclench them to avoid wear on his molars, which were already sloping upward in his gums from his bruxism. He looked at his nasty fan. It didn't move. He employed his duster, hoping that its' weeness and general lack of substance was not an indication of its' efficiency.

Naturally it was. Jackson and his duster had had many other ridiculous chores to do, and it was the same. It was no match for the ceiling fan. The ceiling fan practically laughed at the duster, though he didn't know if it was in derision or was ticklish (he had a good imagination.) Frustration clouded him, and while he was making up scenes of a sparkling and contrite ceiling fan he put his hand on the paint ledge and leaned, which was just a bit too much for the ladder. They tipped and then fell, and a bit of the dust in question fell with them, landing on Jackson's chest. He'd unthinkingly put on a new shirt that morning- nothing fancy, just a work shirt to replace an old one, but one that he'd taken time to choose and that had energizing colors- and the dust that fell was just a small clot, but the shirt was begrimed nonetheless. Jackson himself was fine. He'd turned mid-fall to land on his side and then half-rolled, careful not to tense his hands or feet, avoiding a sprain.

He left everything as it lay. He went to his study and approached his gun cabinet, which was gleaming from Jackson's care of it; because it was floor-level it was much easier to keep clean. He loved his gun cabinet- it was oak, and oak that had been harvested in a forest of older oaks, not from some sapling from one of the chagrined logging industry's environmentally improved tree farms. He had no objection to environmentalism on the whole, but in this case he'd made an exception: it was an investment. It was stained simply, an excellent work of carpentry, solid as a tombstone. He opened it with the key he kept on his key chain and took out his old hunting rifle. The gun was a 30-06 and the stock gleamed, though he hadn't been out to hunt or to the range in two years- he cleaned all of his guns on a monthly basis. He put the rifle on his desk and went to another cabinet that was across the room. He used the key that had been stored in the gun cabinet to open the locked drawer and took out the long, elegant bullets and the magazine, which held five of them. He took them into the room with the terrible ceiling fan.

From the doorway he aimed at the fan, gentling the custom grip, then brought it down again to load the magazine; everything worked beautifully, making all the reassuring noises: the clicking, the chunk-chunk sound of the magazine filling its' station. The first shot was precise, hitting the tubing that held the the fan's umbilical wiring. The second completed the severing and the fan fell on top of the ladder and newspapers. He shot each of the remaining three bullets at a blade and they each exploded in big sprays of dust and linoleum shrapnel, coating the couch and armchair with what looked like volcanic ash. Jackson's ears had started ringing unpleasantly after the second shot. It was quite different shooting in such a small enclosed space than in the woods or on the range. At the range he wore protective ear muffles, and in the woods there was greenery and space, which made shooting feel the most instinctive and right. Jackson wasted no ammunition on a hunt. He looked down upon hunters who didn't discipline themselves enough to refrain from making a bad shot. By the fourth shot it had occurred to him that he should have used his Luger.

The hated fan was all over the room, no longer a helpful household fixture. He surveyed the damage, rifle hanging empty, pointing at the carpet. What a mess, he thought. It was a much bigger mess than he'd anticipated, somehow. He was surprised. He stared at the remains and tabulated how much cleaning there was to do now that it wasn't the fan but the furniture, which was trickier. He'd not thought about thickets of dust and how difficult it was going to be to get it out of the upholstery. Jackson stood there, stymied, for a full four minutes. Finally he decided the first order of business would be to clean his gun and left the room.