You must have forgotten how she’d pressed the shotgun into your hands and curled your fingers around it and told you to run, and if you couldn’t, shoot. How she told you to run as if hell itself was after you. How she laughed without her smile when you’d told her it was.

You must have forgotten how you whispered to her “I love you”  and she would pull the blankets around your shoulders to hide you from the demons and the dark.

You must have forgotten how you could see the shadows of the men and their guns and their round, soft language spoken in a voice gravelly from cigarettes as you went to sleep. How she sat with you. How she hid with you.

You must have forgotten how the smoke from their lungs wafted in through your window and you stifled your cough for fear they would finally come for you.

You must have forgotten what it felt like to grow rail-thin and see your ribs jutting out and hearing your sister say she was finally thin.

You carried your gun to the house, the same one you always had. Sometimes you wonder if your mother’s fingerprints are still there, covered in yours. You hold it like she told you to. You walk up the steps of your old house and walk to the very back, and you know where the cellar is because your mother told you, that night when you were twelve, a minute and thirteen seconds before the bullet hit her. So you know, now, when you pick up the mattress you crawled under when you heard the screams, and you feel the latch, and you tug, and there is a mother there, and her son. And you shoot them with your mother’s gun, like you knew you would.

You shoot them, and they’re dead, and the only explanation is that you must have forgotten.