The Shooting. James Boice

      

      PRAISE FOR JAMES BOICE

      "In The Shooting, James Boice offers a timely and scathing indictment of our current gun-happy culture, cross-cutting hearts and minds in his incomparable take-no-prisoners style. Another stunner from Boice."

      —Elizabeth Crane, author of The History of Great Things

      "Finding James Boice has been a revelation for me. His hard-bitten prose flies off the page at you like the cracking of a machine gun..."

      —Tony O’Neill, author of Sick City

      "James Boice’s sentences crack like hot electric bullwhips across the backs of America’s demons."

      —Christopher Ransom, author of The Birthing House

      "Boice’s prose grabs you and never lets go."

       —Orlando Sentinel

      "[James Boice] masterfully employs a style all his own."

       —Boston Magazine

      "There’s a jittery brilliance...[James Boice] has considerable stylistic flair."

       —Kirkus Reviews

      The Unnamed Press

      P.O. Box 411272

      Los Angeles, CA 90041

      1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

      Copyright © 2016 by James Boice

      ISBN: 978-1-944700-20-1

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2016949289

      This book is distributed by Publishers Group West

      Cover design & typeset by Jaya Nicely

      This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to [email protected].

       To Rasika,

       for her faith, her trust, her fearlessness

      CONTENTS

1. See-You-Next-Tuesday

2. The Gun

(Sheeple I)

       3. The Doctor

      (Sheeple II)

       4. The Guardian of the Flock:

      (Sheeple III)

       5. The Guardian of the Flock:

      (Sheeple IV)

       6. The Boy

      (Sheeple V&VI)

       7. The Handyman

      (Sheeple VII, VIII & IX)

       8. The Myth

      (Sheeple X & XI)

       9. Farewell to Arms

      (Sheeple XII)

       10. Self-Protection

       11. The Inheritance

       12. The Nuclear Option

       1

       SEE-YOU-NEXT-TUESDAY

      Cunt is a terrible thing to call a person. But to many, there is no person more terrible than this one here wandering through Terminal A of Kentucky’s Blue Grass Airport. She is a slender, designer-dress-wearing woman of vague olive-toned ethnicity and indeterminate age—she could be black, she could be white; she could be thirty, she could be fifty—with clacking heels and rich thick hair dyed to conceal strands of white, pulling her wheeled suitcase behind her with one hand while she flicks through her phone with the other hand, earbud in her ear, punching in the dial-in code to join the conference call she is late for—and she, her enemies believe, will bring about the end of America. Compared with this woman, Hillary Clinton is the gang bang queen of the GOP. She likes that they refer to her as simply the Cunt—My mononym, she jokes. Like Beyoncé. The extreme Republicans—the Tea Party buzz-cutted, divorced, red-faced, racist Internet types—call her cunt straight out, while the rest of the party, those publicly moderate types pretending for voters to be embarrassed by their open-carrying John Birch/NRA cousins but in fact are counting on them and winking to them through the lens of C-SPAN at every floor speech, prefer calling her See-You-Next-Tuesday. You know—in case of a hot mic or undercover operative with a phone and its video camera open and the red light on. Cunt. On cue, whenever they see mention of it, her staffers and supporters and members—90 percent female—get twisted up about cunt, they get mean and indignant, stomping around, losing themselves in sputtering monologues and in hammering out op-ed rants; these young diverse women, with educations and abilities, who drool seeing such a big, fat, disgusting, denigrating dismissal thrown down the middle of the plate by these smug, white, aging, entitled men.

      But See-You-Next-Tuesday likes it, she loves it—they don’t call you cunt unless you’re good, she reminds them, unless you’re scary— and she is great at what she does, she is fucking scary. She loves cunt—cunt has balls. You need those if you have been called to do what she has been called to do, which is start the next American Civil War. Though she prefers calling it the next American Revolution or the first American Age of Enlightenment. She considers herself a Gandhi or MLK Jr.—hell, even a Jesus (though if I were to walk into a church, she jokes, I’d probably catch on fire). America needs someone to usher it into the future and she is tired of waiting—she is that someone. The disappointment of Obama was the straw that broke See-You-Next-Tuesday’s back, in that regard. There are no people in the history of the world who hate enlightenment and progress more than the American people, as far as she’s concerned, so if cunt is the worst she gets and not nails through the hands or a bullet through the head or any of the other ways this country likes to repay its saints, then she will take cunt all day long. Not that she is afraid of the nails or of the bullet. Not that she is concerned about dying for the cause.

      Cunt. It’s a beautiful thing to be called by your enemies. She likes her nickname so much she uses it herself. Had a nameplate printed up for her desk: THE CUNT. Is always ready to drop it into her speeches at fund-raising events and political rallies. The word is like a firearm, appropriately enough, in that if you try to use it without knowing how, if you use it coming from a place of arrogance and hubris, you will probably get yourself killed. You have to know how to use cunt. She knows how to use it. How to use it is this: first of all you have to be a woman or you have to be British, preferably both. See-You-Next-Tuesday is the former and her father is the latter, therefore she meets the criteria. So she can say cunt and say cunt and say cunt so as to remind folks what it is her enemies call her, what kind of people her enemies in fact are, the small minority of white men who are responsible for America still being an insane culture of constant unchecked gun violence even after all these massacres—Still Crazy after All These Massacres, as her theme song says—and if that’s how they see her, an unmarried, educated, independent, self-supporting, professional, successful woman and accidental activist enlisted to the Cause when it came kicking down her door and stole her baby girl, Michelle, then how do they see you women? These