the scourge of the midwest

A fluke of genes had rendered her left-eyed. As if to offer compensation, Nature had also made her ambidextrous, but her parents during her childhood had trained her to use her right hand, so when it came to learning to wield a gun she found herself up a slimy creek with the butt of a shotgun for a paddle.

But not for long. She'd always treasured her little quirks, savored them slowly like horehound candy, and so, while other students were passing notes in class, she, a self-proclaimed loner since the age of ten, had practiced writing with her left hand. It was never too pretty, but hell, if doctors could get away with it, so could she.

The first time she held a pistol in her hand she felt like she could see clearly for the first time in her life. The haziness she shrouded herself in like a cloud of flies buzzed off in all directions, and the only things in existence were her body, the target, and the sight down the barrel of the gun. Being left-eyed and right-handed with a handgun, she found, didn't matter.

Shotguns and rifles were a whole different story, the difference between Cinderella floating her foot into the shoe and Jack pelting hell-for-leather toward the beanstalk to get out from under the feet of the roaring giant. Her dad had told her about a guy he knew who was left-eyed and right-handed like her and had learned to cope and was a brilliant shot, but no matter how she worked it, she couldn't get comfortable bending her neck over the stock like the snapped stem of a daffodil.

Till she switched shoulders and started shooting lefthanded. Then everything fell into place like Paul Bunyan stumbling over Babe the Blue Ox in the rain. All those years of taking needless notes in class left-handed paid off with those first blasted holes of buckshot straight through the heart of an old newspaper. Her eye was straight and her hands were happy, and so, she found, was her heart. Happy and warm. Even her shoulder, sore from the kickback, was happy.

When at last she learned how to wear a holster for her favorite revolver, on the right hip for her right hand, instead of at a cross-draw so that she could comfortably carry a rifle with her left, and strode out easily onto the range, her hips swinging companionably in time with her newfound friends, she fixed her eyes on the distant targets and grinned. Even though the weight anchored her to the ground so that her shoes sank into the last of the summer grass, her feet felt catlike, springy and light, and she thought she could see for miles.