I was raised in Ohio where the winters were long and cold and the summers were beautiful and came and went far too quickly. We had to take advantage of the heat while we could and growing up, one of my father’s favorite ways to do this was by tasking my sister and I with manual labor. However, he also enjoyed a good water gun fight.

Back in the days before using a water gun was viewed as a sign that your son or daughter might grow up to be a gang member, my father would regularly challenge his children to a good old H20 brawl. During one particularly hot summer I remember she and I loading up our bright yellow and green Super Soaker 3,000 water cannons and getting pumped for the oncoming battle while my dad was elsewhere loading up a couple of rickety plastic water pistols (and probably entering the initial stages of heat stroke). We would chase each other around the house and unload in a flurry of water blasts and pre-pubescent screams. The only way to really win in a water gun fight is to spray your opponent in the face until they submit. This was the key to victory as it’s the only way to deal any damage. This was also the first summer where the violence escalated.

As we chased my dad, who was completely out-gunned, into the front yard the war waged its way up onto a wooden deck that stood roughly a foot or two off the ground. Running low on ammo and taking constant streams of water to the eyeballs, my father had to make a crucial decision: flee or fight. He decided that fleeing would allow him to get to the nearest water spigot to reload. His exit strategy was simple… shoot what little water was left in the guns at the offspring’s faces and run like hell.

While this process seemed good in theory, he forgot to factor in the deck we were standing on, which as I mentioned, was some feet off the ground. As he made the mad dash for freedom he barreled right off the edge and the ground quickly made contact with the majority of his face and chest. The hands went up in surrender, shielding him from the onslaught that we were delivering and we were instructed to stop as he was possibly injured and we should retrieve our mother immediately or we would regret being born. Now, I always thought myself to be a pretty clever kid and I had been fooled by this charade one too many times. In my mind there was no way that the fall he took could have subdued him, and he was probably just “playing possum” or faking it, and I would prove it. I did what any kid would have done in that situation and began to spray him in the face with my water gun.

In retrospect, I’m sure it looked pretty brutal as I stood over the mangled mass that was my father, using a sort of advanced Chinese water torture on him. Through the gurgles I’m pretty sure I heard him begin to beg for his life and make peace for his trip into the afterlife, but this had to be part of the act. After several minutes I began to take his sobbing seriously and halted. My sister, wide-eyed at what had just occurred, ran to retrieve my mother. It was right around this point where I stood alone over what was left of my dad and realized the gravity of the no holds barred attack that I had just unleashed on my old man. I would be lucky to live long enough to regret it.

Thankfully the concussion that he received from the fall pretty much wiped out any memories of this event. We can all look back on it and laugh. Well, except my father. He doesn’t understand what’s so funny.

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