When It Comes Down to It

By Rachael Greene

While attending a U.S. military college in the north Georgia mountains as a civilian student, I worked at a chocolate shop across from campus. The owners let me study when there weren’t any customers (often the case during off season), and I could eat as much chocolate as I wanted. I liked watching the chocolate churn in the heated cauldron until it turned glossy, then pour in a waterfall over the conveyor belt of caramel or peanut butter squares. The owner taught me how to mark each candy with a small metal tool before the chocolate set to distinguish each of the fillings. A single baby curl for peanut butter, zigzags for coconut, a diagonal line for caramel. Candy-making days were rare, though. The owner was in remission and worked short hours. He and his wife often left me alone to close the shop. 

The chocolate shop owners were friends with the general store owners next door and often gave them and their adult son, Josh, free chocolate. Josh had a developmental disorder that the shop owner’s wife alluded to in hushed tones and apparently made it difficult for him to hold a job or interact socially. He was larger bodied, with dark hair and deep-set eyes. Josh’s parents had given him as much freedom as possible. He lived on his own—as it turned out, in the same building as me—and was the designated salesman for a popular line of grills at the general store. Sometimes Josh would come into the chocolate shop alone, ogling the display case and fogging the glass with an audible breath. The owner’s wife always tried to chat with him, though he rarely answered. The persistence of Josh’s bald stare unnerved me. The times he came in when I was alone, I boxed his chocolates up quickly and handed them to him in a wordless exchange. 

Another regular in the shop was Officer Dan. Officer Dan was young, fresh out of the academy, and handsome in a ruddy, jovial way. The owner’s wife would push me to the front whenever he came in and then watch expectantly as if he was carrying an engagement ring in his pocket just waiting to meet a nice girl. 

Her artless matchmaking attempts created a silent camaraderie between Officer Dan and me, and he made a habit of stopping by around closing time when he knew I counted the cash box alone. We chatted while I zipped up the nightly deposit bags and relined trash bins. We discovered that we were from the same county and that we might have crossed paths in high school if I hadn’t been home schooled. When I locked up at the end of each shift, Officer Dan always offered to walk me back to my apartment, two blocks away, and I always declined, thanking him anyway. 

I was drying trays in the candy kitchen one afternoon when I heard the bell on the front door. The kitchen was separated from the main shop by display cases and a set of low saloon doors. As I turned around from drying my hands, Josh’s hulking form pushed its way into the kitchen. He stood opposite me, belly pressed against the marble countertop where the owner cut trays of caramel and blocks of untempered chocolate. A large knife lay between us, flecks of milk chocolate still stuck to its blade. As if reading my mind, Josh reached out and took the knife by the handle, making his way around the end of the counter toward me. I could feel his powerful breath wash over me in drafts as he edged nearer, the tip of the knife pointed squarely at my stomach. He wore the same leering expression he did when he eyed the chocolates in the display case with their intricate curls and zigzags. 

Everything you think you might do in a threatening situation melts away. This is it, I thought. Though my mind could not quite accept what it was. My hands raised of their own volition, pointlessly, to shield my more vulnerable parts, and my mouth uttered, like an invocation, the name of the only person who could hear me. Josh, Josh. A giddy smile spread across his face, as if this were exactly what he wished to hear. We stood frozen for what felt like minutes. Then, without looking away, he tossed the knife back on the counter. The clang of its blade on the marble made me jump. 

“I’m not that crazy.” 

The saloon doors swung behind him.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” The owner’s wife asked me over and over again on the phone. 

“He never touched me,” I sounded doubtful even as I said it. 

She hung up; to call the general store owners, I assumed. I stared at the spot where Josh had stood holding the knife until my vision blurred. With the front door locked and the machinery switched off, the buzzing fluorescent lights were the only sound.

Tempering chocolate can be tricky. You must heat it gradually for the crystals to rearrange themselves into a smooth texture, one that shines and glistens when it hardens. The trick is to not overheat it. Once you’ve gone too far, the chocolate turns dull and chalky. It can’t be salvaged. 

The owner’s wife sighed over the phone.

“Since nothing happened…” she said, followed by a request worded so gently it sounded as if I would be doing myself a favor. “It would save us all a lot of trouble.”

Was it then or later as I walked home that the panic gripped me? I became paralyzed at the possibility of running into Josh outside my building. Did he know which unit was mine? That I lived on the ground floor with two big windows facing the park? 

Sleep became more of a twilight state that I fell into out of sheer fatigue at the end of each day, frequently disrupted by imagined sounds. At all hours of the night I laid in bed straining to detect noises outside my apartment until my ears buzzed. I was unwilling to look out the window to put my mind at ease because I knew it would not. My vigilance exceeded worry. Every moment I was home I was bracing, waiting for what had increasingly begun to feel like the inevitable crack of broken glass and a heavy breath washing over me. 

I began to think I would feel safer with a gun. I fantasized about having one. My father and brother had taught me to shoot with black powder pistols, then a nine-millimeter. I’d shot other guns too. Rifles, shotguns, even a potato gun. An automatic, once, while my then-boyfriend stood behind me to catch it in case it “ran away,” freeing itself with the power of its own recoil while continuing to fire. These men praised my stance, said I was a good shot, and not in a way that implied the phrase for a girl. 

It's not that I actually wanted to use the gun. I wanted what it represented. Gun beats knife in the rock, paper, scissors of assault. A gun has the power to create distance (read: safety). If I had a gun, I thought, maybe I wouldn’t be afraid of Josh. Maybe I wouldn’t be afraid to be alone in my own apartment.

I told Officer Dan about the incident with the knife. That the owner’s wife had asked me not to tell anyone. That Josh lived in the same building as me. That I was scared. He wasn’t as surprised as I’d thought he would be. He told me he could file a report. No. No reports. He didn’t push. He offered to walk me home every night he was on duty. But what about the nights he wasn’t? 

I told him about the gun. I wanted him to talk me out of it. To say there were other ways to be safe. 

“A shotgun would do the trick,” he said with a steady gaze and something in me clouded over. “I’ll bet your daddy has one. Ask him if you can borrow it.”

I thought of my father’s loaded shotgun on the top rung of the gun rack in my childhood home. “Birdshot, birdshot, buckshot,” he’d repeated with me and my mother whenever he went out of town. Birdshot, he said, wasn’t lethal. Buckshot was. Two warning shots before you meant business. A ballistic one-two-punch. 

“The sound of a shotgun racking— CHK-CHK—” Officer Dan continued, “everyone knows that sound. And if you use birdshot you don’t have to worry about killing anyone or having good aim.”

He seemed pleased with this solution, like he’d solved a puzzle. 

“Of course, I keep a round of buckshot in mine just in case.” 

Birdshot, birdshot—buckshot.

One of those times my father was going out of town, he took me and my mother to the side yard to practice shooting the shotgun into the red clay embankment on the other side of the dirt road. This is gun safety in the South. I remember the weightiness of it when he passed it to me. My fingers strained to grip the stock. How the barrel weaved as I took aim. The way it kicked my shoulder into the tree my father had propped me against. The ringing in my skull and arms lingered long after my father took the gun back. 

I asked him, what if there wasn’t a tree to brace myself against?

“When it comes down to it,” he said, “just pull that trigger.” 

I couldn’t bring myself to ask to borrow the shotgun because it meant doing the impossible—admitting to my family that I was afraid. Instead, I focused on what I considered to be a more immediate solution. I would simply stop being afraid. I continued to walk to work. When my other restaurant job kept me late, I would ask one of the servers to walk with me, but only to the end of the street. I insisted on traversing the final block alone. I volunteered to house-sit for people who lived miles into the woods, sometimes without cell service. One particular house was owned by a woman with two Scotty dogs and a cockatoo. All night, the dogs barked at forms only they could see in the black windows, and the cockatoo talked to itself in a high whine across the hall. I spent the week tiptoeing through the house, scarcely breathing after dark, trying to become the silence I wished to hear. I didn’t sleep. Yet when I handed the owner her keys at the end of the week, it felt as though I had overcome something, if only my own instincts.

One night I came home to find an ambulance and patrol cars outside my building and yellow tape blocking mine and my neighbors’ doors. Officer Dan was among the responders on the scene. I waved him down. 

“We’ll be done in a couple hours, but I can let you in if you want to grab a few things and stay somewhere else tonight.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Man in the apartment next to yours killed himself,” he said reluctantly. “Shotgun.”

I looked at the two alpine green apartment doors, side by side. Mine and theirs. The couple who lived in the apartment often sat outside smoking, but I didn’t know them well. I’d once seen the woman frantically cleaning the windowsill with a toothbrush, which led me to assume she was on meth. The man had been quiet, withdrawn. He kept an old, broken-down Silverado in the space out front. The windows of its truck bed topper were blacked out from the inside and the handles were fastened with a heavy chain. 

Our units were sandwiched between two corner units and had the exact same layout inside. Same wall color and countertops. Same milquetoast furnishings. What had the shot sounded like through the thin walls, I wondered. If I’d been home, would I have called 911? Or gone outside to investigate? Or would I simply have frozen, trying my best to disappear into the silence that followed? 

In my junior year I dated an Army veteran named Kyle recently back from a deployment. He was working on his college degree with the help of the G.I. Bill while serving in the Army Reserves. Veterans were easy to spot on campus—they tended to be a couple years older and though they weren’t in uniform like the cadets, their high and tights gave them away. 

Kyle and I had a sociology class together. His eyes were piercing, and he was refreshingly mature compared to the cadets I was used to sitting next to in class. He carried himself differently, more upright, less hurried. We got lunch at the campus canteen, and he told me about his deployment, sparingly. He had grown up poor but made enough with the Army to own a house and new truck. He kept fish tanks and a garden, which he said helped his PTSD. He gave me a ride to work in his truck, a boxy red thing I had to hop to get into. 

For our second date he took me to a shooting range, which isn’t as odd as it sounds for a date in the South. I had a good time—it pleased me to discover I still had good aim—and I enjoyed his company, but I’d recently been asked out by another guy in English class who read Milton and carried a journal. The next time we met up I planned to break things off, but he surprised me with a memento from our second date. He’d painstakingly cut out each of the targets I’d hit and framed them neatly alongside some of his Army medals. The frame was the size of a full-length mirror. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him I had met someone else after such a thoughtful (if not eerie) gift. I propped the frame in a corner of my apartment. The next time I had a friend over she gawked at it, making worried jokes about the type of guy who frames bullseyes. 

I avoided Kyle until our next class. He asked if I wanted to go hiking at a park a few miles outside of town. Thinking this could be an opportunity to talk, I said sure. We took his truck. We were less than a quarter mile onto the trail when he asked me point blank if I was avoiding him. I tried a version of honesty (I thought it best not to mention the guy from English class) and said I wasn’t ready for a relationship right now, performing the careful choreography to protect his ego that every woman inherits. 

He didn’t buy it. He became increasingly frustrated with my explanations, just as I became suddenly aware that our hike had taken us into a secluded area of the woods far from the beaten path. We paused to face each other. There was a small log between us on the trail. He talked fast about excuses, pressing me for the real reason. The whites of his eyes showed. I could tell from his reaction that he felt threatened, and I could tell from his stance that he only knew one way to handle threatening situations. He stepped over the log toward me. 

My heart raced. This is it. I considered my options—to run seemed damning, to scream the same. One other option presented itself, and I took it. I backed away from him and cowered, nearly wincing. He paused, suddenly puzzled. I told him I had been raped before. 

His demeanor changed immediately. He softened. His arms lowered. His jaw relaxed. 

I was standing at my bathroom sink a decade later when this memory came to life, unbidden, and with it, the revelation of why I’d used this particular lie. The truth was that I had never been raped and for years I had felt ashamed of using a made-up experience as a shield. But for all my shame, one inconvertible piece of evidence validated me—it had worked. 

In the woods that day I had sensed that Kyle was the type of man who, if denied the opportunity to be the hero, would play the villain. Perhaps I had encountered enough of these men to recognize it in time. Perhaps this, like the dance I performed to protect his ego leading up to this moment, is an inherent knowledge ingrained in my chromosomes. Regardless, my instinct told me that miming the victim offered him one last chance to salvage what he was about to do. By creating these roles for us, I had given myself the greatest likelihood of survival at a time when survival, the bare minimum, had been my only priority.

And the bare minimum was exactly what this tactic got me. On the quiet ride back to campus, he asked if we could go somewhere. He felt awful about the moment in the woods. He wanted to make it up to me. 

I could have called someone. I could have refused. Calling for help, running, or refusing to go through with whatever I had silently agreed to meant acknowledging that I had lost control. That perhaps I had never had any in the first place. Rather than allow my initial lie to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, I lied again. This time to myself. 

When he finally pulled up to my apartment to drop me off, I tried not to rush or jump too quickly from the truck. Inside, I double locked the door and compulsively checked the window latches, even though I never opened them. The frame with its row of targets shot through with deadly precision sat propped in the corner. How I wished it were a shotgun instead with its distinctive CHK-CHK. Its two warning shots, aimed to stop. Its last round, aimed to kill. 

If I’d had a gun every time it came down to it, what round would I be on now? 

Josh. Kyle—

Birdshot. Birdshot—

About the Author:

Rachael Greene is a nonfiction writer from Southern Appalachia. She is the winner of the Blue Mesa Review 2022 Summer Contest for Nonfiction. Her work can be found in Another Chicago Magazine, The Masters Review, and Mulberry Literary, among others. She received an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. Currently, she is working on her first book-length work about growing up in rural North Georgia. Find her on Instagram @greenepen.