I guess the first thing to mention is that Mom and Dad are physical people. Mom rubs my back when she passes me by and smacks—maybe that’s not the right word, it’s a light push really—me upside the head when I’m being stupid. Dad gives me a full-body embrace when I come home from school looking sad and puts his hand on my shoulder when he wants to get my attention. Little exchanges like that remind me of one of Newton’s laws, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. When Mom rubs my back, it’s an act of love. So I look at her and nod, which is, in the end, saying I love her back. I give her something when she gives me something. It’s push-and-pull, net force.

Mom and Dad act like that with each other too. Sure, their back-and-forth is less innocent, but that comes with a more passionate love. That day when they were arguing about spoiled milk, for example. Mom was saying Dad should’ve bought a new carton days ago, and Dad was saying that he should be allowed to make mistakes. Mom was saying Dad didn’t listen to her, and Dad was saying he was under a microscope all the time. He kicked her in the shins, a slight rebuke. She elbowed him in the chest to get away from him, her face creased in disgust. He grabbed her by the arm—was he about to apologize?—but she wriggled free and shoved him, harder this time, into the wall. They weren’t speaking anymore. It was all grunts, like two lions fighting to see who’s king. Mom’s black hair billowed like a mane.

Dad panted against the wall and watched Mom for her next move. But she leaned against the counter with a silent sigh. Was she forfeiting? Or had the match come to its natural end? She looked up and saw me. Dad followed her gaze. I waited for some kind of verbal acknowledgement.

Mom snapped her hair into a ponytail. It seemed like she pulled the hair tie out of thin air, but I knew she kept a string of them on her wrist.

Her eyes now lingered on the dishes piling in the sink. “Those need to be cleaned” was what she finally said. Between the lines: Don’t worry, just a scuffle, let’s move on. She’d said as much one day when she’d found me reading in the basement. Dad had been at work. “Don't think too much about what Dad and I do,” she’d said, scratching at her neck. “It doesn’t have anything to do with you. We just…We’re working through some stuff. But we’re not giving up. We’re not.”

I tucked the memory away. Now, Dad turned Mom’s stray observation into a command. “The Gain’s under the sink,” he said to me, as if I hadn’t lived here my whole life and didn’t know where we kept the dishwashing liquid.

I moved to the sink. “Who’s buying the milk?” I asked. I don’t know why. Maybe I wanted to shock them, let them know how long I’d been standing here. Maybe I wanted to have cereal in the morning.

“We have milk,” Dad said, taking a carton out of the fridge. He poured the milk in a pot and waited for it to boil. We returned to normal. I washed the dishes, Mom organized the pantry, and Dad killed the bacteria in the milk. Dad did an impression of some comedian I didn’t know. Mom laughed. They had to scuffle in order to laugh at each other’s jokes. Equal and opposite forces.

That was three weeks ago. Now Dad and I are in a field, the sun high overhead. He has a gun in his hand and fumbles with the cartridge. Rounds are firing in intermittent bursts. There’s a satisfying slap when the bullets hit the targets thrown into the air, and the people here hit the target most of the time. They’re regulars, the beefy dudes and their scrawny relatives. Dad and I are in one of the wooden booths with the stationary targets. Several booths down, there’s a married couple taking turns with a rifle. Some families, too, have stopped by on their way through the recreation center and linger around the gift shop. I hear the murmur of everyone’s far-away conversation and laughter—pointed laughter, at someone’s performance, but also the gleeful screams of entertained children.

If anyone was close enough to see us, they’d laugh at Dad. He tries again and again, but the bullet ricochets off one of the wooden planks or skirts the side of the target. He shifts his weight and wipes the sweat from his face with his sleeve to ready himself for the next shot.

I’m not here to shoot. Thirteen is too young, apparently, even though there are boys younger than I am running around here. Dad says he wants to expose me to this, though. Give me experiences he never had. It’s a transparent excuse. He never cared before if I did things with him. He never cared what I was doing, as long as I stayed out of trouble and didn’t make myself too noticeable. He just didn’t want to be alone, vulnerable like this in the open, attempting something new.

I expected the target to be one of those human-shaped ones you see on cop shows. That outline with the dots on the head, the heart. A strange expectation, I know, because the recreational center doesn’t exist to train serial killers. So the target is just a circle, divided into smaller and smaller ones. If it had been a human, I wonder who Dad would’ve pictured there, as a stand-in for that lifeless diagram. On those cop shows, there was always a shot of the agent thinking of someone, a murderer or a pedophile or whatever, and then hitting the target right in the head. Instant brain damage, dead on the spot.

Two days ago, the summer heat launched a slow attack on us. We didn’t notice at first, and when we did, we pretended not to be bothered. Our mouths and throats dried up, so we reached for water. We tugged at our layers until it was too much and we pulled them off. We were adapting, pushing our limits, seeing how much we could stand. It was 6 p.m. when Mom, a film of sweat forming on her forehead and upper lip, finally approached the thermostat. She pressed down, down, down until the temperature stood at 68 degrees. Dad came into the room at that moment, of course. He walked over and swatted at her wrist, which had been hovering over the thermostat.

“Hey, no need for that! Are you paying the electricity bill?”

Mom stared into his eyes for a beat but said nothing. She walked away. He followed her into the kitchen. She turned around, catching him off guard, and slapped him. He dug his fingers into her shoulders and tried to shake her, but she shoved him. He stumbled backward, and his left hand flew through the air, like it detached itself from the rest of his body, and hit the stovetop. No problem, except Mom was making a stir-fry. His hand missed the pan by an inch.

Dad’s face contorted, and he slid to the ground. He cradled his hand close to his face and crumpled into himself, baring teeth like a nervous and wounded dog. Mom stepped around him and turned off the stove. Then she crossed the kitchen to rifle through the drawers. Offered him a band-aid. She shook it at him, but he didn’t take it. I willed him to take it. If he put it on, everything would return to its rightful place, like pieces on a gameboard after someone wins. Erased history. But he didn’t.

Dad’s eyes met mine. Creep, they said. Why do you just stand there and watch?

But I want to know what happens, and this is the only way.

Two hours later, and there hadn’t been any relief. Sweat stuck to our hair and pooled under our arms. The problem hadn’t been with the thermostat but the AC. Mom called the repair guys and talked to them alone. Dad hadn’t said a word since his eyes accused me.

Last night, Dad came into my bedroom and invited me to the gun range.

“The gun range?” I said. “Why do you want to go there?”

“Come on, the two of us. Father and son. It’ll be fun.”

An apology maybe. I wanted to appease him, so we made the plans and left the next day. I told Mom we were going to the park, a half-truth that she accepted. We left her waiting for the repair guys to come.

Now, Dad hits the bullseye. He squeezes my shoulders and gives me a half-hug. “That’s how it’s done,” he says. “That’s how it’s done.” His eyes shine with pride. They start to dim when he sees my blank expression, so I force a smile. I crave square one, before Dad started acting different, like something was wrong.

“That’s how it’s done,” I agree.

We come home. A cool breeze shocks us out of fatigue, and Dad makes a joke—“Might have to call those AC guys back. It’s working too well now.” Mom emerges from the living room. Her face is flushed, her eyes red at the corners, but her voice maintains its sweet lilt. “It’s too late now,” she laughs. We’ve made our way back.

Roshni Veeramachaneni is a fiction writer from Michigan. Her work has appeared in The RC Review, The Michigan Daily, and now, God’s Cruel Joke. In her free time, she hosts the radio show “VARIETY IS DEAD” on WCBN-FM and is an editor for 101 Words.