I am still and quick and sharp as a new knife. The men can see it, but I can feel it – an immense, furious stillness. The sons are all bluster and noise. They shoot air-pellets at the blue-tongue lizards basking on tractor skeletons, and at the sunburned fruit on a feral lemon tree. When the match warden isn’t looking, they hold their pistols sideways like American rappers. They lock their elbows and fight the recoil so their shoulders punch backwards and their arms vault up.

‘Boom, motherfuckers!’

I take the recoil into my body. I use its bucking arc to set up my next shot, like dipping under a wave and surfacing. I balance the quiet weight of the gun across my arm and down my spine. I anchor it down, down bone after nested bone and into the floor, down through the concrete, down into the dirt. I speak this metal language.

‘Those boys can’t shoot for shit,’ Dad says as we drive home, his hand on my shoulder. He keeps it there and I shift the gears for him. We come home smelling of brass and wax and old fire.

I clean my guns and slip them under my bed. I keep the key to my gun box in the top drawer of my desk, but you can unlock it with a screwdriver, or with the lid of a cheap ballpoint pen. Port Arthur is still a year away.

Mum comes home from her new gardening club with tomato seedlings and a sleepover invitation for me. She always does. It is what I am expected to want, and so I pack my sleeping bag and go. I always do.

This time, there are three of them – friends since primary school. I’ve seen them waiting together at the bus stop in the mornings, rolling up their skirts and pulling at their school ties until they hang like striped nooses. They are not unkind to me. We watch a movie they’ve already seen and add our own toppings to frozen pizzas. We feed thin, bloodied ribbons of beef to a pet axolotl and stay up late doing the quizzes from Dolly magazine (Which mythical creature are you? Are you a secret fashion genius? Are you sex-ready?). But I curdle something here, too.

At night they wear matching, oversized men’s T-shirts with the necks scissored out so they slip down low over their shoulders. They stand in a row at the bathroom mirror and I can see the suntan lines from their bikini tops – three white bowknots, burned into three golden backs. They look like they could be undone. I wear a purple nightshirt with a picture of a grey rabbit in Buddy Holly glasses. Underneath it reads ‘clever bunny’. Sometimes, during a match, an ejecting shell will catch white-hot against my skin – on the dipped ledge of my collarbone, between my new breasts. I have trained myself not to notice. If the throat of my shirt was cut out, these girls would see blisters and powder burns.

Under the gun shed’s corrugated roof, my body is easy to understand – there are parts I must tame, and parts I must forget. I wear a pair of industrial headphones that makes my gun sound like it is spitting a cherry stone from its pursed metal mouth. I wear a pair of clear glasses with the left lens scrubbed foggy with sandpaper, so I won’t squint when I look down the sights with my shooting eye. I stand right-side-on to the target, left hand hooked into the front of my jeans to hold the weight of my non-shooting arm, to keep my shoulders low and straight.

‘If you don’t wear a belt, you can just stick your digits down your knickers,’ one of the boys joked once, cupping his crotch and wiggling his fingers. ‘But don’t get too carried away or you’ll end up with fish fingers!’

I wonder what this set of smooth-shouldered girls would have said. I wish I knew how to ask them.

I don’t sleep. I am tired of new noise. The prowling vigilance of a strange dog, the industrious bubbling of the aquarium. Pair after pair of poster eyes – boys whose names I should probably know by now. And the breathy dreaming of these warm, sleeping girls with their knotted necks. They dream so loud.

The best shooters shoot between heartbeats. A heartbeat echoes across the body – a subcutaneous twitch. And a twitch is all it takes to throw off a shot. I push my non-shooting hand down flat and hard against my belly until I can feel my pulse burrowing its way up. But it’s so fast, too fast.

I step over the unvigilant girls. I walk past the feather-gilled walking fish and the glossy, nameless boys, past the dog. I walk home along the beach. My footsteps churn up phosphorescent grains of mineral sand that flicker out before I can catch them. I walk up high into the dunes where the Geraldton Wax is fully grown, with its tight-budded fists of hot pink. It still smells of the sun, a hard, peppery green. And there’s fox musk, too – a loose thread of stink. I roll out my sleeping bag, lie back, and push my hand against my belly again. The ocean is black and slick as patent leather, but I can feel the dark muscle of it, even from up here. I use the sound of the surf to slow myself down.

When I get home, I will let myself in by levering the flywire from my bedroom window frame and sliding up the bottom window pane. Mum never locks it, because she knows I’m coming home. My bedroom walls are covered in targets – line after line of black circles the size of bread plates. I’ve saved my best scores since I started shooting, and stuck glow-in-the-dark stars over the bullet holes. With the lights off, you can see the shots pull in tighter and tighter.

‘It’s the story of the universe, chickadee,’ Dad said the first time he saw them all lit green. ‘This is what they reckon is going to happen at the very end. Everything will keep creeping closer and closer for billions of years until all of space is scrunched up in a tiny ball, like a sheet of cosmic newspaper.’

‘And then what will happen?’

‘It starts all over again, I guess.’

Soon the men will start calling me Annie Oakley. They always do. They will bring me back issues of mail-order shooting magazines, and equipment they don’t use anymore. A telescope, a set of barrel-cleaning brushes, an air pistol for backyard practice. They will help me mould the grip of my new competition .22 so that holding it feels like slipping into my own handshake. They will stand behind me and help hold my shoulders straight with those big, red hands pocked with skin-cancer scars. Their boys will start to try. And when I still beat them – and I will – their fathers will offer to buy Dad after-match beers in the clubhouse.

But we never stay after the match is over. We never stay. You can feel their relief as I pack my guns. The unspoken cold of it shudders through the shed like recoil, and I don’t know how to dip underneath it. Not yet, but I’ll learn. We leave with bags of rind-heavy lemons from that wild tree, lead pellets lodged in their sinewy hearts.