Eggs and Ammo

Kathryn Jones

January 5, 2025

Saturday morning on the Somervell County

courthouse square. Jars of blackberry jam,

squash pickles, paper bags of pecans, local honey,

and brown, speckled, pale green eggs 

lined up on tables around the market

where farmers have sold their wares for 

a hundred years, first from horse-drawn carts,

now from pickup trucks and flatbed trailers. 

A white Ford-150 pulls up next to the table

selling free-range eggs under a blue tarp. 

Cardboard boxes fill the truck’s long bed. 

The driver hangs a crude sign over the tailgate:

“AMMO” in big black block letters. Cars stop.

People come over to see what kind of ammo

he’s selling – handgun, rifle, shotgun. A customer

wears a T-shirt that reads “Family. Faith. Firearms.”

It’s a seller’s market. People are afraid now

of the different, the alien, the other. 

Fear is good for the ammo business. 

Not so much for the egg business. Stores

have plenty of white eggs a lot cheaper than these

pretty free-range ones. Egg Man packs up his cooler,

folds up his tarp, drives away. Ammo Man 

is too busy taking money to notice.

Kathryn Jones is a poet, journalist, and essayist whose work has been published in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, Texas Highways, and the Texas Observer. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including TexasPoetryAssignment.com, Unknotting the Line: The Poetry in Prose (Dos Gatos Press, 2023), Lone Star Poetry (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2023), and in her chapbook, An Orchid’s Guide to Life, published by Finishing Line Press. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016 and lives on a ranch near Glen Rose, Texas.