It's raining outside for the first time in weeks. The air is warm and wet and the sky is no longer clear or freezing.

The front door of the house across the road opens. A boy, roughly eight or nine years old, appears in his pyjamas. He steps out onto the porch and looks cheerful. His pyjamas are blue with stars on them. He disappears for a moment, down the street, out of sight.

The truck parked in front of the house has a personalised license plate. I forget what the license plate says as soon as I look away. There are no scratches on the truck, but I don't think it's new. The fact it looks new makes me suspicious.

One thing I like about this street is how steep it is. I also like how the houses are low to the ground with plenty of space between. This all means that, on a clear day, you can see the wooded hills surrounding the town, which in turn allows you to imagine yourself standing on those high ridges looking down on where you are actually standing, right now. On a day like today, rain as thin and constant as mist, you can't see anything.

The boy in his blue pyjamas returns from wherever he's been. He goes back inside the house for a few moments and returns to the porch carrying what I can only describe as a Gatling gun made of bright orange plastic. The cylindrical barrels of this toy gun are luminous. They are attached to a folding tripod, allowing you to position the gun wherever you like and walk away. It's the sort of weapon I've only ever seen in science fiction films from the late 80s, or hanging from a helicopter in footage of the Vietnam war, spraying the jungle with metal. It's a machine you can't imagine anyone making and then not regretting. It looks like something we shouldn't have.

The boy seems pleased with his toy. I don't know where he disappeared to previously, or why. He sets the rotary cannon up on the porch, facing outwards, into the street. The barrels point towards the house I'm sitting in. It's not my house. I'm looking after a cat for a friend. The boy is pointing his toy gun at the house but I don't think he can know I'm here. I have the lights on but people all along the street have their lights on. That can't mean much. The boy isn't targeting anyone in particular. In fact, he is setting up his gun thinking that no one is watching. He is having fun in a world containing only himself. In the years ahead, this sort of fun will get harder and harder to achieve. He will start caring about the rest of the world and what it thinks. This can be a good thing and it can be a bad thing. Right now, he is pretending to set up a Gatling gun on the porch of his parents' house. Perhaps he is imagining people who need to be gunned down. Children imagine death and sex all the time. Remember being a child. Remember all the death and sex you thought about when you were a child. We forget that we thought about those things before we were supposed to.

If it was a real gun, it would be capable of ripping through the walls of this house as if there were nothing there. I wonder if the bullets would travel as far as the hills surrounding the town, the ones you can't see on a day like today. I bet bullets are slowed down, infinitesimally, by moisture in the air.

The boy finishes setting up his toy. A Christmas gift, no doubt. Orange plastic, bright in the grey, thin rain. The boy goes back inside, closes the door, and a few minutes later returns, dismantles the gun, goes back inside again. 'Game over, man,' I think.