Gunsmith
by Henry Luzzatto

When I was six years old, I got suspended from school for pretending a stick was a gun. I remember pointing it at Ms. Gore, that reedy, perm-wearing teacher with too-large glasses, and imagining a burst from the stick firing into her head, the first bullet impacting right above her left eyebrow and blossoming out of the back of her skull, the second shearing off her bulbous nose, and the final blasting into her jaw so it hung off like the last piece of meat on a lamb chop bone.