Wonder Born
Larry Menlove
After the wind blew the willow tree over in the side yard between our place and the Getty’s, my brother and I ventured out to take a look.
Mom screamed from her couch, “You boys be careful out there!”
The tail end of the storm was howling over the back fence and over the swampland like some banshee-bred creature, busting over the earth and searching for its parents to tell it a thing or two. What was left of the wind was whipping our striped shirts around our skinny torsos. We had both worn these rugby shirts for six weeks straight. We had vowed not to change or take a bath until Dad came back. Ketchup and mustard and all manner of ten- and eleven-year-old summer-gore clung heavy to the thinning cotton.
My older brother, Ricky, reached the hole first, but he didn’t see it right off. I held back in awe at the roots reaching up like tentacles; great chunks of lawn clumped and clutched in the arms of the upended tree.
I stepped up to the hole beside Ricky. His greased hair was oblivious to the wind and smelled like fried chicken. The ground was soft underfoot like a pillow, and I looked in the hole. Where once the tree stood was a gaping maw of violent, torn earth. The old tree was ninety-degrees wrong. It once had a branch low enough for even us to reach and pull ourselves up and then shimmy and work our way hand over foot as high as we could; then Dad would come under us in his camo and wonder aloud, “Where are my boys? Where are the men to go hunt in the swamp and bring food to the table?”
The old willow. Dead like a deserving man shot in the head.
I saw it there in a crevice where a root had been—a fat brown rabbit. Quiet, nose twitching, ears flat and down over its back. I pointed. Mute. It looked at us. We looked at it.
Our hunger. Mom’s trouble. Dad gone. Though we didn’t believe or understand those men on the porch: “The Secretary of the Army has asked us to inform you, Ma’am, that your husband has been reported missing in action outside of Tikrit, Iraq since March 5th.”
Ricky took the stone from above him, a big one hanging in the roots. He looked at me. I nodded.
My big brother, always the one who knew what was right, always the one who said, “He’ll come back,” cocked his arm, elbow just inches from my ear, and let the fury fall on the wonder born in the hole next to our home.
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Larry Menlove writes from Utah and has works in 42opus, Dialogue, Dogzplot, Storyglossia, Sub-Lit and others. He was the winner of the 2008 Irreantum Fiction Prize.