Ryan Griffith
Saint Samuel Colt, designer of the revolver mechanism that enabled a gun to be fired multiple times without reloading.
His first sculpture, The Culmination of All Sadnesses, was ravaged by the art class critique. That night at his father’s forge he melted down the metal and reshaped it into an object long and dusk-colored, something that would make him understood.
Saint Eliphalet Remington, founder of Remington Arms, one of the largest gun manufacturers in the world.
He loved the open throats of creatures in his scope, the stillness. The way they listened, heads cocked, to the distant click of metal. After rifles, Remington produced typewriters, but at night the sound scared his children, the report of keys striking paper like the hoofbeats of incessant beasts.
Saint Oliver Fisher Winchester, manufacturer of the Winchester repeating rifle.
After her husband died, Winchester’s daughter-in-law, Sarah, moved to San Jose, California, where she built a chaotic and never-ending mansion which came to be known as the Winchester Mystery House. She believed that each new room was a wound healed only by the addition of a newer room, until the entire house was made of wounds.
Saint Richard Jordan Gatling, inventor of the Gatling gun, the world’s first machine gun. He adapted it from a seed planter, the cartridges spitting bullets instead of new blooms. The rapidity of its fire, Gatling mused, would reduce the need for great armies, thus diminishing the numbers of soldiers who died by disease. A quintessential American philosophy: massacre by bullets is more elegant than slow decay by contagion.
Saint Robert Oppenheimer, Father of the Atomic Bomb
His eyes were the suffering blue of an American Christ. At parties he enjoyed quoting Vishnu, the Hindu god of preservation: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Everyone laughed, waiting for another joke.
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Ryan Griffith’s fiction has appeared in Peatsmoke, Trampset, Flash Frog, The Cincinnati Review, Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions, Best Microfiction, and elsewhere. He runs a multimedia narrative installation in San Diego called Relics of the Hypnotist War.