Guns of the Borough

By Shannon Coghlan

What's the worst thing you've ever done? Guns of the Borough is a chapbook of five short stories, whose narrators tell you just that. They explore themes of revenge, regret, social justice, urban violence, gender stereotypes, and parenthood.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shannon Coghlan
• Release date: Dec 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9780578822679

Book preview

Sow What You Reap

Years later, I’d become a mother. My first son was born at lightning speed, which sounds good on paper, but I’d eventually understand how much stress a thing like that puts on a baby. I say it was his accelerated entry into the world that made him so jittery, left him with psychological scars and the capability to disrupt teachers and throw things at walls. Once, when he was ten, he swung a baseball bat at his brother’s head. But the truth is, the thing only a mother knows, is that a child’s personality imprints when he’s still the size of a small apple, clawing at the interior of his host’s abdomen, all hours of the day and night, unable to contain himself. I tend to stick with my breakneck birth story, because most people don’t want to believe that mothers can’t shape who their children are.

This story isn’t about my kids though. They are, despite this description, for all intents and purposes, very good kids.

This story is about Lena Graham, or maybe it’s about Lena Graham’s mother, who would do anything to protect her daughter from girls like us, from me and Tara and Brooke. I’d seen Mrs. Graham around the borough. I mean, you had to notice her. She weighed two hundred rock solid pounds, and every inch of her was covered with the kind of tattoos that only men got. My mom told me to be polite if I ran into her, but I made it a point to avoid her. I imagined she kept a shotgun next to her front door and a case of knives under her pillow, and it turned out, I was right.

I was fifteen when the three of us hatched up this little plan to scare the living shit out of Lena Graham. It was supposed to be innocent hijinks, really, because Lena never did anything specific to warrant our bad side. Except for the fact that she pestered us in the hallways. I mean, look, Tara, Brooke and I weren’t exactly the popular girls at school. We didn’t play sports, and our grades were nothing special, and in hindsight it’s easy for me to see that we had zero sense of fashion or current events or even music. We were, for lack of a better word, invisible.

What we didn’t need was Lena Graham shining an awkward spotlight on us every time she called out our names or rushed after us in the cafeteria. Because Lena garnered lots of attention, and none of it was good. Lena was the kind of kid that now, as a mother, I recognize quite easily, a creature like my oldest son. Today a behavioral therapist might say she had Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. A psychiatrist would prescribe drugs that other kids kill to get their hands on. We all know Lena Grahams. They lack self-regulation, self-awareness, self-control. It’s easy to blame that on their parents, or on a stressful birth, but I’m a mother now. Kids like that are conceived with a touch of something.

And then there are kids like me and Tara and Brooke. We were conceived with a touch of evil.

This story starts with the three of us in Tara’s bedroom. We had the windows wide open and her box fan on full blast, so the room wouldn’t smell like cigarette smoke. (Of course, I can tell you now as a mother, that room reeked of cigarette smoke). We had started to spend every waking minute together sometime after we’d gotten our periods and noticed how underappreciated we’d become. When we were alone, in Tara’s bedroom or at the reservoir or in that filthy alley behind the Two-One-Five, we started to fantasize – out loud – about all the terrible things we could do to people. And not just the popular girls or the football players who ignored us, mind you. We talked about mutilating store clerks and homeless men and little children, with no preference for one over another.

What you need to know about Brooke is that her stepdad had been abusing her since she was five years old. Not the despicable kind of abuse like anal rape, for instance, but a subtler type of touching, the kind of thing that wouldn’t be questionable in court, say, or to Brooke’s mom. He’d caress Brooke’s neck,