writeoneleaf:

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Smith and Wesson

“Orange.”

“Orange what?”

“No, it’s ‘Orange who’. Orange who.”

“Fine, orange who?”

“Orange you glad I didn’t say banana?,” she smiled slowly, lazily from the bed. And perhaps no one would catch it there, or was meant to. Her hand covered her face, shielding her eyes from the remnants of the high noon sun through their cheap blinds. The city was orange, and beneath her mask was a smile that slanted exactly the way Batman’s wouldn’t.

“That’s terrible. That’s…the worst,” he said, eyeing her slow smile, and then her free hand from the floor. She was waving a gun lazily, shaking it a little, as if to say “my turn”. Because it was. Or, well, it would have to be if they ever wanted things to go smoothly. He got up, crossed their pile of woefully unfilling 100 Calorie Snak Paks purchased on sale and eaten on empty stomachs too desperate to taste the aspartame, and took the gun from her hand. Everything felt slower than usual to him. Were it not for her slow smile, the whir of the fan, the prison bar shadows from the window, and the heft of the gun, he could have believed he stopped time himself, this boy.

We’ll name him Locke, just as his mother did, before she left. Locke Smith, the unfortunately named, took the gun from his lazing partner and laid it on the flattened pillow case on the floor, just beneath the neatly organized components of his own rifle. Unlike Barrel, the slow-smiling short-haired scrapper on the bed, Locke took immense pleasure in the upkeep of their guns. If it was up to Barrel, they wouldn’t use guns at all, but this element of their partnership was a dream of his. He has only ever had one hero, legend tells, and her legacy is one left only to guesswork, much of which he filled in on slow days like these, in small rooms like these, where orphans like Locke and Barrel still live. Flying cars round time’s corner as Locke and Barrel come of age in tiny stucco’ed rooms with faces to match the walls. And Locke lives his dream. He is a Cleaner. Just like Mathilda. His hero. His Superman. When he performs maintenance on one of their guns, he is a priest in church. “Bullets as sacrament. Blood as wine. Not a great metaphor,” Barrel had said, but it was enough to go away with him. Enough to quit her beat selling news, but not enough to hang up her hat. Across 13 state lines, Barrel plows through the New York Times and the New York Times only every morning, putting a dent in the food budget.

“Tell one,” she says, prodding him with her foot, sitting up to play the spectator. Barrel, gun for hire, assassin feared more than he and and a few of the best, and New York Times: Sunday Edition enthusiast, prods him, and it is the most calculated, annoying prod on the face of the earth.

Swab in hand, he turns his attention to the barrel muzzle of her pistol. “Your foot is dirty,” he says.

“It’s not. You got a problem with my foot? Is this not my best foot I am putting forward here?,” she replies.

“Let me rephrase: I have in my possession, two guns. The only guns in the room that aren’t locked down. I am not here for your amusement, Bar. I am a dangerous man!” and for all intents and purposes, here, he took himself very seriously.

“Come on.” she said, after a pause.

“Why do you want these awful puns?”, he replied.

“It’s important. There’s an art to these things, you know. Just like what we do. Just like what the magicians do,” she says, as convincing as anyone with a loose foot can be.

“That’s bullspit,” he decides, as close to fighting words as he ever gets.

“Alright, well, indulge me, then, Leon,” she says, watching him like a bored cat.

“Mathilda. Leon is dead,” he replies, out of reflex.

“No, he’s not,” she rolls to sit closer to Locke’s spot. “He’s the plant. It’s clear he’s the plant at the end. She was burying Leon.”

“Fine, okay. A priest, a rabbi, and a two hitmen walk into a bar—”

“No—” she interjects.

“You’d think one of them would have seen it coming,” he finishes, drowning her out.

“No, start again,” she says.”

“A rubber band pistol,” he starts, putting down the gun, and pointing his index finger and thumb, “A rubber band pistol was confiscated from an algebra class.”

He pauses.

“It was a weapon of math disruption.”

She smiles, in the way that Batman wouldn’t.