Three

this moment happens many years ago, before the reckoning and before the cycle began again. there is a boy; there is the scrub brush in the desert--low and gray green and sharp. they are beyond the high hill behind the white weatherbeaten double-wide. there hadn't been rain in many weeks but the low ocean of cloud whispered of first snow. the father has a gun. he crouches low against the dust and the cold air rushing towards them spoke brightly in the father's ears of betrayls and disagreements. inside the mother sat with her back to the window facing the hillside and nursing the welt on her face crying and shaking--the boy knew this, the father knew this.

the wind blew low and the cloud cover drifted glacially across the sky. the pronghorn and the pronghorn calf stood near each other at a distance that made the shot difficult under good conditions. the animals stood with their heads lowered towards the ground; the calf moved one leg a step forward, putting it just below the point the father aimed for on the grown animal. watch the boy watch the father; watch him and know that he can understand, he is not too young. the rifle shot cracks and echoes across the hill; the pronghorn explodes in motion and zigzags sharply across the desert disappearing quickly around the next low hill of the anticline that stretches for a few miles in any direction from their property.

goddamnit.

the fathers' words carry on the wind; the boy hears but does not. he watches the lump of the calf in the distance watches his father get up and turn back, walking towards the house, gun hanging from the strap across his shoulders.

he sits and watches; alone now the air speaks to him--questions and intimations

he is standing over the body of the calf. he is watching it gurgle air through its nose, listening to its gutshot panting, watching it not die quickly.

afterwards he drops the rock bloadsoaked next to him. it was almost too heavy for him to lift but he wanted to in a way that he had felt before, an immediate and frightened mind. the calf lifeless; skull broken and panting stopped.

the boy's walk back to the house is slow, his return to the house unnoticed. he lay down on the couch and slept until late that night. he rose from bed and remembered.