Killing Machine.
by Andrew Careaga
“OVER 400 GUNS IN STOCK” says the sign outside my town’s only pawn shop. I go there sometimes, whenever I’m in the mood to browse and perhaps purchase a gently used fascist-killer.
No, not a gun. I walk right past them. Past the racks of rifles on the wall behind the counter, past the glass counter full of pistols and the jewelry my wife likes to look over. (She’s found some good deals here, or so she tells me). I walk past the chain saws and weed whackers, past the big-screen TVs, the laptops and iPads, computer towers and monitors, PlayStations and Xboxes, stereo equipment and amplifiers, and on to the spot in the back, where the killing machines hang.
I’ve bought a few good ones here, but most of the inventory consists of cheap starter-kit stuff, the things parents buy their kids who want to play rock star: the Squier Stratocasters and Epiphone Les Paul knockoffs, made to look like the real things, and the acoustic-electric Fenders, the Estebans (as seen on TV), and all the other castaways, their bodies scuffed and chipped, their necks warped from humidity and neglect.
One day my wife surprised me with a Taylor 12-string acoustic-electric she bought there for a mere five hundred dollars. No deals on jewelry that day, she said, so she splurged on me for a birthday slash Christmas gift. It was a thing of beauty: smooth, honey-colored Sitka spruce top, rosewood sides and back, rich mahogany fretboard, not a scratch or dent anywhere on the body or neck. And the sound! A heavenly jingle jangle only a 12-string can create. I cradled this killer with care as I inspected it, then wiped it down, put some Fast Fret on the pristine strings, and tested some of my favorite 12-string songs on it. I fingerpicked my way through “More Than a Feeling,” “Wish You Were Here,” “Over the Hills and Far Away”—all songs I’d previously mastered, more or less, on six-stringers—and finally, that Pete Seeger folk tune made famous by The Byrds, “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Every Thing There Is a Season).” As I plucked through “Turn! Turn! Turn!” I imagined Roger McGuinn and his magical touch, of how he transmuted folk into rock-and-roll, like Bob Dylan and so many others. And my thoughts turned to Pete Seeger’s friend and fellow folk singer, Woody Guthrie, and how he famously defaced his pricey guitars, those Gibsons and Martins, with the phrase “This Machine Kills Fascists,” a slogan that became as famous as his songs. And I thought about World War II, my father’s war, and how Woody picked the strings of his killing machines and sang his anti-war songs like the one about tearing the fascists down, and I wondered if this machine in my hands could be so powerful. And as I wiped down this instrument before returning it to its chocolate brown gig bag, I wondered whether I could turn it into a killing machine of its own, or whether, in my hands, it would become something less lethal, something strummed and plucked not at protests for peace and justice, but at campfires.
Andrew Careaga is a writer from Missouri whose work has appeared or soon will in dozens of literary journals, including The Argyle, Burial Magazine, Cowboy Jamboree, DarkWinter, Frazzled Lit, Flash Fiction Magazine, In Short, and Roi Fainéant. He also has work forthcoming in two anthologies: Bad Intentions: Crime Fiction Inspired by Warren Zevon (Literary Garage, July 206) and DISSOLUTION (La Rotonde Review, August 2026).
“Killing Machine” is his first appearance in The Itch.
