I guess I should get to the incident with the gun. Our life before the incident was full of parties, drinking, playing poker for cigarettes. At the first party Daddy took me to I sat on the arm of his chair while a girl asked me who I was, what I did. I felt shy, threatened by her beauty and her relationship to Daddy—I made up different scenarios, that perhaps they’d fucked before or kissed or at least shot-gunned weed. I walked onto the patio to smoke. Four men played poker for cigarettes on a frosted-glass top patio table, a mélange of Kools, Camels and Pall Malls all piled in the middle. Daddy came outside and the sound of Tech-Nine echoed and muted as he let the door close behind him. He placed his hand at the small of my back and we joined the poker players at the table. I was more comfortable out here with Daddy and the other men. The women wore dresses that swung from their hips and had straightened their hair. A stocky man wearing a white t-shirt and black Dickies tossed me a few cards. The assortment seemed random to me so I aimed on collecting colors; that seemed right. When we revealed our hands, I laid mine out and looked at everyone’s else’s, all indiscernible to me.
“Is this anything?” I asked. Daddy slapped the table, laughing. The other men roared with laughter, too. I hid my face in my hair. “I don’t know how to play.”
Daddy touched my arm. “Girly, you just won.” He slid the pile of cigarettes into a gallon-size Ziplock bag. “That’s a flush.” It was enough for a week or more between the two of us—a whole carton.
After the party, I stayed at his apartment for a few weeks. When I think of our time in his studio, he had very little belongings. A bed, an entertainment center, a TV and a gaming console. He played war games all night, slept all day. When he was high, he wanted to hold my hand and lay his head in my lap, ask me questions about my dreams or plans. They all included him. Then we walked to the grocery store and got whatever we could afford to eat for the night, sometimes just apples, cheese, a loaf of bread. Once, he made me miso soup. He began smoking weed constantly—not a second without it. On the twelfth consecutive day of being high, he woke up at four p.m., smoked a bowl, and left the room to brush his teeth. The shower faucet turned on. I scrolled through news on my phone, not paying much attention. He yelled my name from the shower.
“I’m staring at the tile,” he said, “and a portal to hell has opened up. Daisy, how long have I been here? Will I ever come back?”
Four days later, he felt sober again. After that he didn’t smoke anymore.
A couple times, neighbors called the cops on us for our parties. You’d hear everything through the walls. At three a.m., Officer Halstead came and told us to keep it down. A group of us had been singing “Wrecking Ball” by Miley Cyrus at the top of our lungs.
Everything was good with Daddy. We drank and drank, and had parties on the weekends. Full-time employment was difficult for him for several reasons I can’t divulge. Daddy must have anticipated the change that had to come, but maybe he wasn’t ready. I had to stop drinking.
It was a morning I had to be at work at five a.m. to open. It didn’t matter where, all those jobs were the same. I woke up at 3:45 to shower, and when I checked the date on my phone, I’d realized something felt off. I pulled back the shower curtain and found Daddy in the tub, his gun held tight to his chest, empty beer bottles in his lap.
He took a pull of his beer, and it reminded me of the darkness that lingered in him. We were bound now and yet I knew of his past, the potential for future grief. Daddy would always be unstable. He was sad and his sadness manifested as anger. When I think of it now, the stability, what I could have had, something hardens in me. At one point in my life I may have cried, but now I don’t anymore. I know what I have chosen.
I was tired. And a little nauseous. Daddy offered me a beer.
“I’m pregnant,” I said. I hadn’t bled in two months, had somehow missed it. My stomach distended sorely. I didn’t need a test. Daddy shifted in the tub, and a jealous throb rang through my ears. I could no longer be complicit in his ability to commiserate through drinking.
“A baby is such an abstract thing before you have it,” my mother once said. “But you give birth to it, and this thing becomes your baby. A hole the size of a grave widens between you and your friends and in the grave is your child-free past. Gone.”
Daddy swilled the liquid around in his beer bottle. The nausea lurched towards my throat.
“I’ll leave you to it,” I said.
“Are you going back to sleep?” he asked. His speech slurred.
I nodded. “I’ll call in to work.” The warmth of his flannel comforted me when I leaned to kiss him on the forehead. He put a hand on my stomach and left it there for a moment. I had a feeling everything was going to be okay.
I left and crawled back into his bed—a mattress on the floor. The sky grayed through the windows, and the radiator hissed on. I was happy to be alone for a while. Soon I would never be alone again. I placed my hands at the flattest part of my body, right beneath my ribs. My stomach rounded up a little, but only on one side. I placed my hand on the firm lump. I imagined it growing, able to receive all it needed. This small human in my charge could die. Part of me was also dying. The internet told me the baby was the size of an olive. Somehow, it seemed so much larger already.
Out of the dark, I heard what sounded like a heavy plank of wood fall against a floor. I knew immediately what it was. I waited for scuffling, or screaming. The moment stretched and my heart beat heavy patterns into the silence around my ears. I dialed 911, but did not call. I hid beneath the sheets, instead, waiting.
The last time I had done this, Daddy and his friend Jeff had stayed up drinking, like any normal night. I woke to fighting. They moved across the apartment and I noticed the friend wasn’t playful, this time. Jeff had become belligerent, too drunk to realize. Later, Daddy said he thought he might have to kill Jeff that night. Something turned in him, some raw, angry thing had been let out, something that had been holed up for a long time. Jeff wasn’t letting up, and Daddy moved into a guillotine pose to choke him out. Daddy tried to subdue him and failed at first. He rolled and got him in something that looked like a cradle hold. His face was red and wet with spit. I hid in the bathroom, wondering if I would have to grab the gun. Jeff packed, too, and for the first time in my life I feared what it meant to have a gun in the apartment.
Footsteps rang from the bathroom and the door burst open to a glowing silhouette of Daddy, the pistol in his hand. His hair was ragged. He gripped a pulsing dark spot at his abdomen.
“I’m sorry,” he slurred. He took a step closer and I jumped out of bed, ran towards him. His eyes were tight pinpricks of fear.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he said again. I placed my hand on his gut and took Daddy to the bed. We lay there in the dark. He put his hands on me in protective places, one over my stomach, and one on the side of my cheek. His mouth hovered close to mine. The purposeful in-out of his breath at my lips.
“I can’t stop making bad decisions,” he said, in a low whisper. “I keep trying to do the right thing, but each step I take seems to be a wrong turn.”
“You don’t make bad decisions,” I said, trying to pull him from the bed.
“The gun isn’t legal,” he said. He went deadweight.
An urgent dread filled my lungs and I breathed the way I’d learned from watching pregnancy videos, “Hehe, hoo,” as I struggled to get my foot through the bottom of my pants. I looked for my sneakers, and slipped my feet into them, sockless.
I threw a faux fur coat on over my pajamas and tied my hair up into a ponytail.
Daddy turned off the lights, leaving a splotch of blood on the switch. By the front door, I noticed it: a small bullet hole in the ceiling, and two smaller holes in the wall near it. He gripped his torso with an apologetic look.
I led him out the front door and locked the apartment. We rushed down the stairs towards the car. My foot caught a banister on way down, and we tumbled forward to the landing. For a split second we both were weightless. I thought of the grave then, a deep well, each new moment a handful of dirt being thrown inside. 
Elle Nash is the author of the story collection Nudes (SF/ LD Books, 2021) and the novel Animals Eat Each Other (Dzanc Books), which was featured in O, The Oprah Magazine and hailed by Publishers Weekly as a “complex, impressive exploration of obsession and desire.” Her work appears in Guernica, BOMB, The Nervous Breakdown, Literary Hub, New York Tyrant, and elsewhere. She is a founding editor of Witch Craft Magazine and edits at Hobart Pulp and Expat Press. Nash also teaches a biannual workshop called Textures.
“A Deep Well” appears in the story collection Nudes, out now from SF/LD Books.
