Writing and Photos from the archive of Marc Balet

I was 7 or 8 when my brother tried to kill me. Those were fun times. A cousin had given him a WWII rifle some years before. He kept it in his closet tucked away behind his shark-skin suits and the many presents received from our parents who adored him. One afternoon he grabbed that war relic from its hiding place and sought me out in the living room. “Stand there so I can shoot you” he commanded. He was almost 10 years older than me so I obeyed. I thought that wouldn’t take long. I’d stand there patiently so he could ‘shoot’ me and then I’d get on with my day.

That day might consist of sketching dream houses for Jayne Mansfield and her glamorous brood to live in. Or I might pluck a long, tapered fern from the nearby woods and transform it into a great, graceful bird. Then, running on the front lawn, all chubby and dreamy, I’d imagine it flying far above me, escaping everything. On special days, I concocted imaginary bus routes in Fulton Park and carefully planned the stops around the ponds. At each stop I mimicked the sound of a bus coming to a halt. I’d open the doors of my bus and pick up ‘passengers’ along the empty, winding paths that led nowhere special.

“Hurry up and shoot”, I said.

“Stand still for a minute so I can set the site right on your heart. Don’t move.” Fred said.

“Almost got it...”

Then, my mother yelled the one life saving word, ”Lunch!”

“Your bacon and eggs are on the table getting cold, Marc.”

I made a beeline for the food. I always did.

Seconds later we heard a big blast from the living room. My mother and I ran in to see my brother standing with the rifle at his side looking blankly into his bedroom. The bullet, shot from deep inside the shaft of the old rifle, had ripped right through his room, shredding the sheer curtains that hung at his window. Pieces of fabric, wafting in the breeze, were all that was left. Beyond that, a very large hole splayed outward from the window screen. Shattered glass lay everywhere. The old bullet left a large, memorable, black crack in the clean, white, shingled surface of our neighbor’s house.

This was one of many family occurrences we would never review.

Six televisions at our home hindered the need or desire for ever discussing much.

Years later, as a favor, my brother picked me up from school for vacation and drove me back home in his red, shiny, foreign, sports car, convertible. We rode silently most of the way staring straight ahead, like watching TV. At one point during the drive, though, he turned with a smile and yelled to me above the roar of the wind, “Remember how I almost shot you that time?

“I do”

“Well, you know”, he continued “If you think about it and I had killed you that day, you’d be pretty much forgotten about by now.”