Bridgette decided the gun tasted like a penny. She knew, because she’d eaten coins far back as she could remember. The nervous habit embarrassingly carried into adolescence, but it made her an expert, as each coin had its own flavor. Dimes, for instance, tasted like moldy Mentos. Nickels were thicker, more gritty, like playground bark. Quarters were horse pills; quick swallow, no taste, if you were lucky. Once she ate an Icelandic Krona found outside a Winn Dixie. Anticlimactically, it only tasted like dirt from having been on the ground for so long.
But pennies were the superior choice for the money-swallowing connoisseur. They were rusted and used, caked in dirt, blood, and copper. Pennies tasted like the hands of those who begged, who picked callouses, who scraped and saved. Pennies connected the weak with the strong, alive with the dead. A penny was worth something in the afterlife. That’s what Bridgette’s mom had told her all those years ago before she shot herself in the head.
In Bridgette’s mind, there was no refuting the gun was a penny.
If she had her way, she would be tongue deep in a coin jar, letting more of the change pool in her piggy bank belly, but her friend Mariel had found the gun in her father’s garage—a cheap .22 short round. She called Bridgette over immediately to horse around and “have fun.” The whole idea seemed coltish as they were both teenagers, old enough to know better, but it was too hard for Bridgette to turn her down. So she went over, and they played with it, pointing it at each other for a while until Mariel placed the barrel between Bridgette’s lips and said, “What if I pulled it?”
Bridgette sipped the air between chamber and uvula like cheap wine. Mariel laughed and said, “Relax, I’m just teasing.”
She hoped Mariel was teasing. She’d caused enough trouble in Bridgette’s life, to the point her aunt forbid the two from associating. Of course, Bridgette didn’t listen, as was often the case when it came to Mariel. The older girl was always playing games, manipulating innocent situations to make them dangerous. It wasn’t until they’d known each other for a while that Bridgette even learned what she was capable of. Still, she took Mariel at her word for a little while, until she lit her cigarette. Mariel frequently stole cigarettes from her mother’s purse and lit them in the garage, smoking them out the window and into the backyard. A dark brown ring formed around the rolling paper from her lipstick. “Bridgette,” Mariel said.
“What?”
“What would happen if I pulled the trigger?”
Bridgette knew what would happen; in simple terms, she would die. If she didn’t know from her own mother, she would have known from the internet. Her cousin was into conspiracy theories and true crime, frequenting sites like Liveleak for uncensored videos. One in particular he played to torment her—a video of a man shooting himself in the head after the attempted murder of a pop star. Depending on the point of impact, the death was instantaneous, blood leaking into the carpet and the floor. From the mouth, surprisingly, as the bullet didn’t always exit the back of the brain. Instead, the blood would come up the front, like the deceased was vomiting pennies.
A puff of smoke came into Bridgette’s face.
“Calm down,” Mariel said. “I was only kidding.” She held out her hand. It was her turn for the gun. Bridgette obliged and Mariel put it in her mouth, a Siamese twin to her cancer stick.
“What does it taste like to you?” Bridgette said.
Mariel shrugged, finger gliding along the pleasure point of the trigger. “Should I do it?” she said with a mouthful of gun. “What do you think would happen?”
“Something bad.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
Bridgette was frozen. This didn’t feel right, certainly wasn’t fair to see her friend doing something so stupid. She spoke cautiously, “You don’t want to do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’d die.”
“So what?”
Mariel’s words were still garbled as she was still nursing the gun and the cigarette. She put the cigarette down first, then the gun, leaving a slick residue on her tongue. Bridgette sucked on her lips, since she was void of coins, her nervous habit. Suddenly, her stomach felt broke as Mariel flipped the gun in her hand like a ball before putting it back in her mouth.
Bridgette could never make heads or tails of her best friend, but hand on the trigger, her friend was simultaneously begging to be stopped, begging to die. For the first time, Bridgette noticed little marks on her arms, small circular burns rolled up along pale skin.
“Put the gun down,” Bridgette said as Mariel shot.
Unlike the video, and unlike with her mother, there was an point of exit for the bullet. It was an image she couldn’t burn out of her mind, no substance could flush her best friend’s death out of her mind.
Bridgette felt as useless as she had the day her mother died, but felt a comfort when she saw the blood creeping along the floor, reaching its fingers out like a beggar. Mariel’s eyes rolled back into her head, a lone coin rattling somewhere in the back of her throat. The bullet, covered in blood and slightly lopsided, rolled to Bridgette’s shoe. She picked it up and placed it on her tongue.
The bullet—she decided—tasted like nothing, forceless nothing but skin cells and the dirty garage ground.
Anastasia Jill is a queer poet, fiction writer, and aspiring filmmaker. Her work has been published or is upcoming with Poets.org, Lunch Ticket, FIVE:2:ONE, Ambit, apt, Into the Void, 2River, Gertrude, and more.