The man with sandy blond hair and chiseled features leaned against the rotting wood fence and watched with pride and a little awe. His hair danced in the wind as the impending storm grew. He’d walked to the overgrown field to tell Maribel to come inside but had been caught by her poetry in motion. Her small body held the shotgun with ease and each shot hit its mark when the clay discs spun in the air only to disintegrate in a cloud of dust as the tiny markswoman held steady.
Pop pop pop. Not a single miss. She was a natural. A shooting virtuoso. Not many would describe a markswoman as a child prodigy, but that was exactly what Maribel was.
Every day she began to look more like her mother, and the beautiful agony of it all created tiny slivers in his heart. She was a constant reminder of all he’d lost and all he’d gained in that one fateful moment.
He was twenty-five at the time. He hadn’t known the first thing about taking care of a squiggly helpless infant, but somehow, they’d muddled through together with the support of his mother, and then she’d left him all alone to finish the job. He’d done the best he could.
It would have been better to have a boy. The town folk gave him disapproving looks at the way he was raising his little girl. They begrudgingly admitted that it was clear he adored her and she him, but taking a girl hunting at age five elicited frowns and shaking heads. Where he went, so did she, and so began her fascination with shotguns.
“That steady aim of yours is gonna make you famous someday,” Ray shouted above the wind to his daughter.
“I’m gonna be like Annie Oakley.” Maribel set her shotgun next to her side and posed, grinning as she showed Ray the gap in her teeth.
“Come on in. Storm’s fixin’ to blow you off your feet. You can practice again tomorrow. Okay?”
“All right, Papa. Will you shoot with me tomorrow?”
“We’ll see. I got a lot to do around the farm and can’t be wasting my time having my little girl keep showing me up as the better shooter.” Ray smiled and waved his hand.
Maribel picked up her shotgun and scrambled after her father. She let the screen door to the old white farmhouse slam, barely managing to remain standing as the strong wind pushed against her small body. She started helping her father by setting the table, looked over her shoulder and asked, “Pa, how am I gonna be famous if they don’t have the Wild West show anymore?”
“The Olympics, Maribel, you’re gonna be in the Olympics someday, and you’re gonna bring home the Gold for the US.”
“They got skeet shooters in the Olympics, Pa?”
“Yup, and double trap, too. They’re allowing women to compete again. Boneheads stopped letting women in the games in ’96, but it’s back now. Thank God too many people raised a ruckus. Tomorrow I’ll teach ya how to change your style. No more holding the shotgun against your shoulder. Ya gotta learn to start from your hip ’cause that’s the way they do it now. You can’t move your shotgun until the clay is released.”
“Oh Pa, I can’t wait to learn a new way of shootin’. It was getting boring, ya know?”
Ray chuckled and patted his daughter’s head. No matter how much she started looking like her mother, he wouldn’t let the pain creep in again. She was and would always be his pride and joy.