Making Believe.

I was at Safeway looking through the neverending aisle of chips when a small boy started walking towards me. He was probably eight or nine and he was walking down the aisle while pretending to shoot at the bags of chips in the top row.

He would take three steps forward and stop, turn his shoulders and pretend to rack a round into a shotgun that he imagined holding in his two hands. After taking careful aim at a bag of chips he would pull the imaginary trigger and let out a low “boom.” He even made the proper motion for recoil in his hands with each trigger pull.

After destroying four sets of chips and progressing down the aisle the boy stopped in front of me. He leveled his make-believe gun at me and took careful aim by closing one eye and looking down what would be the sight. I stood there and stared at him with a blank look, not sure what to think about what I had been observing. We stood there for a moment until I asked the boy what kind of gun he was firing.

“It's a shotgun. A 12 gauge,” he said while still pointing what had become a very real seeming weapon directly at my head.

“Oh,” I replied.

And with that the boy turned his aim from my face to a bag of Dorito's Cool Ranch chips a foot away. He pulled back his finger and nothing happened, no boom and no recoil. I looked at the boy confused. “Must have gotten jammed,” he shrugged and walked on down the aisle towards the salsa.