'Contentment and Moonshine' by Cole Beauchamp

She will visit her cousin in the city hospital, pinched into submission by Mama hissing, “Go on now.”

Stepping forward with a mouth full of sawdust, trying not to breathe the air that reeks of sick and disinfectant and urine even though everything is shiny bright, she will say, “Here Billy, this jam cake is for you.”

Another jab from Mama. “And?”

She looks at the contraption holding up his leg, long metal pins and a harness hanging from a metal pole. “I sure am sorry about your leg.”

Silently she is wishing him agony, burning pain, a crippled leg. She knows what human cells look like from Biology. She pictures his deformed, slumping in a wet mess like her frog after Billy stuffs it with a firecracker. Withered like the bird who used to feed from her hand until he shoots it with his BB gun, whose feathery nothingness she buries under the hemlock.

“Can’t catch me,” she says, taking off because running is the one thing she’s better at. Billy never can resist a challenge. When he falls there’s a cracking sound, like a twig snapping, before the howling starts.

“Go play now,” her mother says every Sunday when they visit. As soon as the adults see each other they are hooting hello and flinging arms and shooing children. They sprawl across the porch, laugh so loud the crows flap from the trees, sing offkey to the banjo, tucking into jar after jar from the still out back.

She digs the hole with care. Lays branches over it. Practices jumping it in one clean leap.

Her mother settles into the rocking chair, contentment and moonshine softening her face. “Isn’t it great to have a brood like ours? They can look out for each other when we’re gone.”