Tilting at Pinwheels by Michel Lee Garrett
from Windmills: a PUNK NOIR Magazine series
“He always loved the sunrise, you know?”
“Did he? Never really watched one myself.”
“Take it in, then. Your last chance.”
Dawn haphazardly overspilled the horizon, diluting the sky’s blackness and casting the day’s first rays of sickly gold down into the graveyard.
“You think I’m scared?”
He turned to look over his shoulder up at me, his face busted and bloodied from our evening together. Crimson stains had already deepened into muddy brown streaks down his designer shirt. His blood had done the same to my work apron.
“I don’t care,” I said. “Soon you won’t be anything.”
Beside us, the pinwheel stuck into the ground beside my son’s grave spun lazily in the morning’s barely-there breeze. A little windmill, waiting for the wind to bring it to life.
“What you don’t understand, people like you, this business? It’s not personal. It’s ones and zeros. Numbers in a spreadsheet. You pay protection, we use the green font. You don’t pay, we use the red font. No yellow boxes. Binary. Yes or no. That’s it.”
The pinwheel spun slowly, little alternating sections of green, red, and yellow plastic. The fire had been red and yellow. It had eaten through the restaurant and climbed the walls to our apartment above. It reached his room first. His walls had been painted green. Now they were nothing. So was he.
“It wasn’t personal? That’s your argument? You think that’ll help you?”
He shrugged. “No. I don’t. Because jamokes like you take everything personal. You think you’re the first father who’s lost a son? Look at history. In a different age, people like me burned whole villages to the ground. Not just one little greasy spoon behind on their payments. Whole countries. Entire families, bloodlines, cultures, gone like that. But you have no perspective. Just me, me, me.”
The little windmill slowed to a stop. I cocked the hammer of the pistol. If the sound concerned him, he didn’t show it. Just rolled his head around, stretching gently against the ropes around his appendages.
“You got me,” I said. “Mr. Selfish.”
“I lost a son too, you know. Some street trash gang didn’t want to bend the knee. I said, ‘Tommy, teach ‘em to show some respect.’ Took a bullet to the face, trying to make me proud.”
“Yeah? And what’d you do?”
He chuckled. “Rounded ‘em up, put a bullet in the back of their heads myself. Execution style.”
I pressed the barrel into the little nook where his skull met his spine.
“Guess we’re not so different, huh? Two fools who buried their sons, then went tilting at windmills about it.”
He was silent a moment. “Huh. Guess you got me there.”
“Anything else you want to say?”
He shook his head. “Nah. Just do it. I’ll go see Tommy. You’re the one who will still be stuck down here.”
He was right. I hated that he was right.
I pulled the trigger. Blood and brain matter, expressionist splatters of pink and red, splayed out across the green cemetery grass. The wind picked up, rushing through treetops and between rows of gravestones, catching the arms of the pinwheel and bringing it to life, a blur of color.I lit a cigarette, sat down, and waited for them to come for me.
This story appears as part of Windmills, a PUNK NOIR Magazine series.
Bio
Michel Lee Garrett (she/her) is a noir author, Pennsyltucky poet, and recovering journalist. She has investigated courthouse corruption as an investigative reporter, directed communications for a U.S. Senate campaign, and worked as a university president's speechwriter. She is the author of Born a Ramblin' Man and Other Stories (April 2025, Shotgun Honey), the editor of Transcendent Love: True Stories of Trans-for-Trans Relationships (forthcoming, JKP Books), and the editor of Burning Down the House: Crime Fiction Incited by the Songs of the Talking Heads (April 2024, Shotgun Honey). She lives in Central Pennsylvania, where she works in higher education and serves as a LGBTQ+ community organizer and advocate.
PUNK NOIR, the online literary and arts magazine that looks at the world at its most askew, casting a bloodshot eye over the written word, film, music, television and more.
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Justice served. I like how he realized his own hypocrisy before he got it. Nice tale.