My son likes to destroy things.

He likes to blow up water towers,

raze barnyard structures,

demolish whole walls of houses with grenades

launched from a weapon on his shoulder.

He looks through the sight, with a lower-case L encapsulated to show him where his shot will land.

He spoils landscapes by obliterating trees with thirty bullets fired

in rounds so fast it makes my headspin.

He devastates a company of enemy soldiers in a few seconds, shells flying wickedly back over his arm. The explosions are ear-shattering.

The flashes of light- even in day- make me blink.

My son has “guys” named Sweetwater, Haggard, Redford. He’s prevented from shooting them,

but when I see one of them get in his face, I know

he wants to see what would happen if

he tried to blow a nose off, or shoot through the eye

of the man with three-day-shadow on his cheeks.

You can almost feel the sandpaper of it.

It’s a wargame that’s so real, I yell, “TURN IT DOWN!” from the kitchen. My tender sensibilities can’t take the adrenaline surge that is inevitable- collective consciousness- when I hear gunshot and screams.

Apparently this boy-man of thirteen can handle the urge. He seems to thrive on it. It gives him an energy lacking in day-to-day life.

Is it the dragons he’s not able to slay any other way?

The middle-school angst and leftover shame

of being the scrawny kid who got beaten up in sixth grade? The testosterone,

increasing daily in his body,

leaving behind more and more rapidly the little boy who had to have his stuffed white tiger to sleep peacefully at night?

Last night as I looked in on him, I found that white tiger on the floor, atop a pile of clean laundry. I picked him up, silently thanked him for being there in the years since the boy’s father left, and snuggled his body in the crook of my son’s sleeping trigger arm.