Flight Risk – Bryce Warnes

October 6, 2025

My mother bought a compound bow and started shooting holes in the faces of her enemies. She stole photographs from social media profiles and printed them with my father’s old office inkjet. The photos were blown up beyond reason, fatly grained, but my mother didn’t care. From forty paces her lawyer, my father’s lawyer, the cops, the woman from social services, and the flight attendant each became discernible, features cohering in light of distance.
        She covered the cedar fence with printouts, but left one patch empty. It made a face that wasn’t there.
        At that time I was bringing home men who had young families and brutal hands. A particular physiotherapist got heavy rotation. In the suite above the garage he would bend me in such a way that I could not longer see how my parts related. Mornings, I would flip the duvet, erase our prints. The Realtor was in the habit of showing up unannounced.
        Cracking eggs into a frying pan, my mother asked the physiotherapist what had brought him to our little coastal suburb. He put on his bedside manner, describing the sea and its restless legs, and I watched her albumen whiten.
        Our neighbours’ yappy Pekinese had been silenced anonymously that winter by a piece of cheese driven through with carpet nails, and now the dog’s survivors, a retired couple, lived in fear of points. The husband detipped their lawn twice a week and the wife dug up the shrub rose to replace it with a meek rhododendron. They had no enthusiasm for archery. The Strata received complaints.
        My mother printed two new targets and tacked them over others which, by this point, had been wounded to oblivion. She turned nocturnal. In order to keep the motion-sensing light awake while she notched her arrows, she danced a one-sided waltz on the patio.
        We shared a sedan whose title was in dispute. Its upholstery was redolent of old arrangements. On the back seat I kept a wadded red polo and a nametag marked with the logo of a major office supply chain. Because my mother understood me to be working very hard and often very late, she bit back any misgivings she may have had about my face. I watched in the mirror as it untethered from itself, becoming less a proxy of a person than a promise in lieu of.
        I spent long days touring the low bars and wingless hotels crowding the airport. I handed out photographs captioned with the number to a phone I kept under my mattress.
        The physiotherapist stopped calling. My bruises senesced to green, then yellow, evoking the autumn of my childhood.
        One afternoon the Realtor brought by a pair of well-heeled murmurers. They toed our home with their eyes. The Realtor painted the big picture for them, patching inexplicable holes with market projections and promises of rental income. Their offer was inoffensive.
        Movers came and stripped our lives into boxes. All contents of my father’s office went to the dump, save the old printer, which my mother transferred to her bedside table.
        I had neglected to remove a print from the tray, a tight crop of our last photo together as a family. I am not sure which upset my mother more, my betrayal or the gap in her anger the image implied. The photo was all face, my father’s fists beyond reproach.
        The next day, while I was out, movers emptied the suite above the garage, leaving only the prints my bed had knuckled in the carpet and, orphaned on the wall, the coaxial cable’s wan umbilicus. I discovered that I could pack my various segments into the back seat of the sedan and become almost asleep. Nights, while the patio light was awake, I got up and violated the fridge, skimming from styrofoam clamshells and gargling my mother’s milk.
        In the butter compartment I found registration forms for a firearms training course.
        Eventually my landside patrols paid off; one of the missing posters must have found the right hands. An anonymous tip came in by text, leading me across town to a motel, hourly and making no bones about it, where I found a man who fit the description but strained it at the seams. He held the room long enough to attempt to make his case. Having failed, he embellished it with a skinning knife.
        Things would not work out between us. I do not trust intermediaries.
        Coming home late that night, entering the ruins of our kitchen, I found my mother pinned to the physiotherapist. They had rearranged the bar stools so as to best configure themselves, and where parts interlocked I spied familiar swellings. My mother’s expression changed from pain to pained.
        The physiotherapist left without his watch. My mother, never one for a direct attack, turned to tears; she trotted out old memories but I unhorsed them with my own, more thorough, fabrications. She taught me what I can know.
        New messages keep coming in, elbow-to-elbow with calls from drunks who want to make me promises. I block numbers, then unblock them. The map I keep in the glovebox is rashy with red dots marking the likeliest sightings, and when I have exhausted each spot I run it through with a dead ballpoint pen.
        The latest messages suggest intercontinental transfers, membership in certain clubs, understandings. I am going to need an atlas, but I do not know where to look for an atlas.
        An airplane mechanic promised me a juicy tip if I send him my photo.
        My mother draws her targets on flaps of cardboard; the printer is out of ink, the house empty. She makes her bed on the patio’s last remaining chaise lounge, pressing the wrist of her bow hand to her lips as she sleeps. On the fence the blank patch has been filled. The new portrait is sketched in Sharpie, haloed with near misses. I recognize my face by the expression I make. From this distance, I can almost read it.