Sunday

Every Sunday morning, I’d lose my father. Mother could be found with a mild frog in her throat, pulling out a smoke before reaching for the fridge door to make her usual: scrambled eggs and bacon. Sunday mornings were made for muskrats! My father would shout from the hallway, voice vigorous but body stumbling toward the coffee machine. I’d follow him down to the basement, still in my PJ’s, hair in a braid, watching black liquid spill from his speckled camping mug as he loped down the narrow brown stairs.

Saturday evenings were for fishing, then sitting on the porch until it was dark enough to see the shooting stars in the mountain sky. I was allowed to stay up on Saturday nights because no one cared what the kids did or didn’t do once the whiskey flowed from fancy containers in the living room. Someone would always end up on the piano, singing, so sleep was not made for Saturdays. But, regardless of the time we eventually crawled into bed, Sundays were early and Sundays were for muskrats.

He never missed a beat. Other mornings, I’d hear the saw mill of his voice down the hall long after mother had finished cleaning the dishes. Sometimes, brother and I would break into his room and wrestle with the log of his body until he woke up, groaning. Mother would shush us out like house flies. But Sunday, I could watch him move through pre-dawn with purpose.

Predictable, he’d always load up bullets in the worn, square leather case with its dark brown strap, then swing it over one shoulder, leaving room for the black Colt .223 he’d place over the other shoulder, mumbling the whole time, or humming an Alan Jackson or Aaron Neville song, songs he’d put on repeat while we’d drive around in the Jeep Wrangler on the days he let me tag along. By the time I could hear the bacon sizzling upstairs, my father would be halfway to the pond, body barely visible in the near-dark. If the mountains weren’t there, the sun would already be visible, but he would time it just perfect so the light would begin to peak right when he made it near the dam. In the minutes it took him to make it to his resting stump, there’d be a point in distance where he’d disappear, lost by me in my hiding spot, near the apple tree just off the edge of the house. His body far enough and the light weak enough to create a sort of panic in my chest.

On Sunday mornings, I’d lose him as one loses a ring over and over again off the side of a boat, into the mystery of murky water. I’d hold my breath like so many fish in a net. I’d hold on until I’d hear it—the first bullet, the consequences of its release vibrating, ricocheting off the mountains and against my chest. I’d wait. Again and again. The pause between gunpowder cracks and the reload, a suspension. The reverberations, a celebration. My father, alive and well, always hummed as he returned home, full daybreak behind his shoulders. Sundays were for muskrats and the sound of their death, a relief.

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Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick’s work has appeared in Salt Hill, The Texas Observer, Devil’s Lake, Four Way Review, Sugar House Review, SWWIM, and Huffington Post U.K., among others. A graduate from Sarah Lawrence College’s MFA program, Hardwick serves as the poetry editor for The Boiler Journal and her first full-length poetry collection, Before Isadore, was published by Sundress Publications. She currently lives in a village outside Cambridge, England.