FYI

Obviously this attempt didn't work so well. That said, I'm not with it. I currently fashioning a short story out of this beginning and some other brainstorming. In fact, I have what might be the end and the plot figured out.

He didn't really ever remember the cold sting of the wind on his face or the wetness of his socks when he looked back on that day. What really stood out to him and what he later described to me in vivid detail was the weight of the gun in his hand. He talked about how it after a short while of holding it his side, he became tired and rested it in the front right pocket of his jacket. After a while he shifted it to his other hand and then to the other pocket. "It was as if I had never held something so heavy in my life."

He described in detail how the rubberized grip and cold steel seemed to be tugged down by some extreme gravity as though it's natural resting place was in the slush and snow of the narrow alley he occasionally peeked from. But there was something right to it, he insisted. Something about the gun that was more definitive than anything he had ever known. "I couldn't have held it otherwise. I just knew that this was the most real experience I'd ever had and I didn't want it to stop."

Personally, I couldn't relate when he first told me. It seemed he'd developed some fetish for the thing and just couldn't let it go. I'd heard of such things, people so enamoured by an object that they lost sight of everything else. I just didn't expect it to happen to my own brother.

"You should try it sometime," he would insist.I just shrugged and looked down, mumbling something about being busy. "You see the bead line up with the end of the barrel and everthing is clear. Just promise me you'll go to a shooting range someday." "We'll see," I'd say, hoping to brush by the topic. There must be something, anything, we could talk about other than this.