A Time of Sundering

Abstract

A deer thrashes through sawgrass, quail blunder above cover. A bale of steel mesh rests, inert, between us, my father and I. We're getting the slab ready to pour. I stay behind, my weight on the open end, while he wrestles it out about twenty feet, and we don't talk. The wire threatens to buckle and spring back. And then moonlight in a motel room, and my father stretched out on the bed. Amazed by how bright they are he fingers the scars where wire prongs once entered his chest. When the woman he's with awakens he asks her don't they remind her of shattered skeet littered at random, or shotgun shells, since the brass cap on the bottom lasts unnicked, the glint strong in it, and she shakes her head No, and again, No. She must like them, the way she touches them, as if they were opal, or pearl. But she can't give him anything. A bale of steel mesh rests between us. I stay behind, my weight on the open end, while he wrestles it out about twenty feet, and we don't talk. The wire threatens to buckle and spring back. And I, unconscious of everything except my body's salt and dirt, gnats stinging, rust in a fresh cut my eyes blurred and half burning I let go without warning.