It always burned my dog-hide that my little brother was more athletic than me. It didn’t matter what game it was – whether football, basketball, bowling, or even shooting, he was always top notch whereas I was something much lower rung.
Every day after Thanksgiving, my extended family would get together and do some skeet shooting. There was no winner, but there certainly were losers. I was the lame-o nerd who ‘wasted expensive bullets’ and usually just threw some skeets. Hell, even my cousin who smoked so much that he couldn’t run a lap around a football field could shoot better. My grandpa who has super progressed glaucoma would laugh.
Every time I was forced to attend, the prayer slipped through my lips, dear Lord, why does the alternative to skeet shooting have to be shopping?
(135 words)
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This was a rather detailed picture to write a story about for the Flash Fiction for Aspiring Writers #194! Just in case family members from my Facebook read this, know that this was only loosely based off real life, and I’m not mad.
Thanks to Yinglan for the picture!
Let Me Tell You the Story of... 
I thought for a second it would turn dark at the end, and the narrator would get revenge, but then I realized it was creative non-fiction.
At least the narrator got a chance to skeet shoot! I only ever got to shoot at cans! 🙂
As the nerd, I found skeets really hard.
Nice flash fiction!
Thanks!
Whew. Very well-written. This has a lot of layers to it. I wonder if you framed any parts of it around masculinity? The last sentence gives cause to it.
A lot of this is framed around Southern honor psychology, much of which is interwoven with toxic ideals of masculinity. I *don’t* like shopping, for real, but part of it was the sheer loss of honor by choosing that option over the skeet shooting.
I’m currently reading Gone with the Wind and the Wilkes are being frowned up for their interest in books, music and poetry as opposed to shooting and drinking. I have seen on WordPress that southern Americans tend to favour shooting and hunting, but I had no idea that these ideas of ‘masculinity’ were still heavily prevalent. Or is this changing, at least even a little bit?
I think it depends. I now live in a more suburban area, one of the most progressive in the south, and I’d say those more genteel areas are coming to appreciate art and stuff. The rural areas, like where I grew up, do not. It makes sense to me, though – not much point in art if you get eaten by a mountain lion or fail to feed yourself when the crops all die.