Outside of a vague memory of wearing a "
Price Is Right" T-shirt driving back home after dropping my much-older brother off at school, the earliest recollection of my childhood probably only dates back to when I was four or so.
It was about ten on a Saturday morning; I had been awake for about four hours already watching cartoons. My newly-teenaged brother (Justin) was being prodded awake by Mom, and I remember giggling that he was getting in trouble for not having taken out the trash the evening before. A little while later, Dad walked into the living room, turned off the television, and told me that I had a new chore: taking the compost to the pit behind our house. Hooray!, I thought, I'm a big girl now! Dad helped me put on my shoes, and I skipped cheerily out the back door, swinging the one-gallon ice cream bucket back and forth.
As a matter of custom, every boy over the age of six in the South owns some kind of firearm, and Justin, having completed his morning chores, was shooting his BB gun in the back yard, making targets of the old camper abandoned in the woods nearby and various small living creatures. I made it to the compost pit (a Grand Canyon-esque fifty yards from the house), dumped the banana peels and coffee grounds in the hole, and put the bucket down to examine a small white butterfly.
"Kate," my brother whispered.
"What?"
"Stand still."
"Why?"
"Just. Stand. Still."
Six clicks and a loud POP later, I was on the ground screaming.
He had shot me in the ass.
Upon hearing my piteous cries, my parents rushed outside to see what had happened. Mom scooped me up and carried me inside, then placed me on the couch while she looked for something cold from the freezer. She came back, and I continued howling, clutching her bag of frozen peas to my hindquarters as though they were the only thing keeping me alive. Dad came inside with Justin, gruffly informing him that this would not be happening a second time. "We do not aim weapons at people, understand?" Justin mumbled a quiet apology, and his gun was placed at the back of Mom and Dad's closet for several weeks.
My bruise has long since been healed. The gun, after being used religiously for shooting hair spray and shaving cream cans before disposal for ten years, was retired by Justin and me, with one final shot over the compost pit.
Mom and Dad don't remember the incident at all.