In Short – Issue 2 (Winter 2025)

January 31, 2025

Image credit: Gael Varoquaux

Boy + Gun

By Ira Sukrungruang

This is not about guns. My feelings about them are resolute. If guns vanished, there would be less death, less violence. No amount of political propaganda or the preaching of constitutional rights will change my mind. 

But this is not about that. 

What keeps me up at night is image. Is what I, as an immigrant son, who was seen as outcast because of race and religion, observed about the boys in our neighborhood in Chicago, about the quality of men we Chicago boys strived to be. It was simple. Boy + gun = power. We posed with our toy guns. We pointed guns the way of Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, Charles Bronson. Our language changed with a gun in our hand. Our demeanors. Our bodies. 

With a gun, my shy tongue loosened. My walk transformed into a strut. My smile was shadowed in mischief. I became unrecognizable. 

Or, perhaps, recognizable. Recognized.

There was a gun in our home. It was locked in a suitcase of important things. I found it one day. I was a boy good at finding things. Before me was a gun, a real gun. Not the popping one I played with, not a toy. I unholstered this real gun. I could barely heft it in one hand, my wrist bent from the weight. The gun was silver and shiny. My reflection of opened-mouth awe played on the body of the gun. This gun was the most beautiful thing I had ever laid eyes on. I felt its beauty. Felt it in the coolness of metal. Felt each muscle in my arm and hands and fingers contract because holding a gun—this real gun—awakened the body in new ways. Felt my mouth dry from excitement and fear, so I kept swallowing, trying to bring moisture into it. I don’t remember how long I held the gun. Long enough to think it was mine. And wasn’t that cool? Didn’t I look cool with this gun in my hand? 

I put it away. Thinking I’d never see it again.

But I did. 

One night. 

In the fall. 

The trees were bare, and the shadow of branches quivered like a skeletal hand on the brick of our house. 

Someone kept knocking on our front door. A steady knock. 1-2-3. 1-2-3. It was near midnight. I remember being roused from sleep, my mother holding me close to her chest. I liked the feel of her red and gold nightgown, soft and cool to the touch. Something was wrong, though. I could tell by the pressure of her arms, her hand pushing my face into her neck. She held too hard. Whispered too harshly. 

1-2-3.

1-2-3.

“Do something,” my mother said in Thai, her voice high-pitched.

My father went into the closet and then came out with the silver gun in his hand. 

We followed him downstairs. 

1-2-3.

1-2-3.

He looked through the peephole of the front door. Saw no one. 

1-2-3.

1-2-3.

My mother squeezed breath out of me. I made a sound she didn’t hear. 

“Go,” she hissed.

My father was a short man. A man who wore khakis and pastel golfing polos. A man who walked like a penguin. A man with thick-rimmed glasses. A man who kept an astrology book in his back pocket because when he wasn’t working at the textile factory off Cicero Avenue he read people’s fortunes. This man, my father, on that fall night, opened the front door and held the gun in both hands to the side of his head, the way the cops did in the show Hill Street Blues, and stepped out into the night, the outside chill passing through the doorway, onto us—mom and boy—while my father pointed the gun, gripped so tightly you could see the inner workings of his hands, up into the neighbor’s apple tree with skeletal branches, and then my father’s eyes followed a long string that was tied to a large metal bolt taped to our front door, and that string led to two teenagers in a tree, light hair and light skin made lighter by the deepness of night, who were pulling the string to make the bolt knock on the door, 1-2-3, and here you would think my father would lower the gun and tell the teenagers to get out, but his hands continued to hold the gun, never wavering his aim at those boys, never saying a word, and the quiet of that moment seeped into my bones until the boys jumped out of the tree, screaming, and booked it out of the neighborhood, the night swallowing their bodies whole, and even then, even when they were gone, my father remained still, the gun still, and me, his son, saw everything from inside that door, his son in his mother’s arms that clutched too tightly, that billowed the air out of him, and his son, on that night, thought his father the coolest man of all time, a man usually devoid of cool, save this moment of him aiming a gun into the skeletal branches of an apple tree. 

God, that boy thought, my dad is the coolest. 

God, that same boy over forty years later, his father nearly a decade gone, that gun gone, that boy now a father himself, who doesn’t allow his son to play with toy guns, thinks—still—my dad is the coolest. The image of that night has burned into his psyche, and when the topic of guns comes up, so does this image. Despite how he wants to banish all guns. Eradicate them from earth. He sees his father—gun in hand—in the light of adoration, with little thought of what would’ve happened if the trigger was pulled. He forgets—this son/this father—even when a gun is not fired, there is an intention. Always an intention. 

Ira Sukrungruang (he/him) is the author of four nonfiction books This Jade World, Buddha’s Dog & other Meditations, Southside Buddhist, and Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist; the short story collection The Melting Season; and the poetry collection In Thailand It Is Night. He is the recipient of the 2022 Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year in Nonfiction, 2015 American Book Award, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature, an Arts and Letters Fellowship, and the Anita Claire Scharf Award in Poetry. His work has appeared in many literary journals, including The Rumpus, American Poetry Review, The Sun, and Creative Nonfiction. He is one of the founding editors of Sweet: A Literary Confection (sweetlit.com), and is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College. For more information about him, please visit: www.buddhistboy.com.