Target Practice

The two men were the first people to come upon the scene, that is, since what had happened had happened.

‘What’s the story here?’

Larry followed Tim’s eyes to the can of Bud Light glinting in the sun a few feet from them. The pointed end of a length of wood that looked like it was once a part of something bigger was stuck in the can’s opening, holding it up in the air.

‘Target practice,’ Larry said. ‘See them bullet holes.’

‘Yes, but beyond that, beyond the obvious, what do you see?’

Larry was walking behind, so he could roll his eyes without Tim seeing. After three weeks working with Tim, Larry had decided that his revered mentor sounded much smarter with a camera before his eyes. On their last shoot yesterday, in an empty room with white walls and an empty picture frame hanging askew, Tim kept screaming, his voice bouncing off the walls, ‘Visualize the things no one else can!’ Larry visualized himself decking Tim.

In keeping with their theme for the week, Empty Spaces, they had come to this place.

‘It’s like someone set this up for us,’ Tim said.

He was right. The day before, after burying the body of the friend he’d shot for sleeping with his girl – having decided to do so just a moment before he turned from the Bud can during their daily target practice – a local man had decided to leave the scene as it was.

Target Practice

The man would never have been able to put it in quite the right words, but he felt there was something poetic about that can, blue as the sky above it, being the one voiceless witness.

And the two photographers agreed.

They raised their cameras to their faces and started to click away. On his eighth shot Larry took the picture that would win him a thousand dollars four months later and save him from being kicked out of his bedsit. To take his twentieth shot, Tim had to walk several steps back, his left foot coming to settle above the groin of the man resting, not quite in peace, four feet under.