Doug is holding the rifle the way a child holds a toy they have forgotten why they wanted when he tells me about his boyfriend. He is telling me because we both can see the sickness we share. The sin. I would never dare say a thing. To our family and the church we are invisible. Dad is somewhere out here, a blur of gray and tan. I don’t want him to see. Doug is crying hard, loud as the falling spring snow on the bank of the half-frozen reservoir. He points the rifle at me. His eyes are the clouds when he begs me to mirror him in blood and in more than blood. They drill me from somewhere in the sky, far away.

Say you thought he was a deer. Say you don’t know where the hunting vest went. Say you feel it too.