THE YOUNGS

1
We fish salmon or carp or rainbow trout or any
kind of fish we care to call them. Alewife, bowfin,
walleye, muskellunge with teeth enough to take
a finger down. Doesn’t matter what name these

heavy bodies haul up through the dark slop of
the sewage creek to die and spawn or die in
drowning, a paste of black muck on their meaty
gills. Dirty water only ankle deep—they leap

from pool to pool exhausted over rocks and roots
and the five bowling balls we stole from Dewey
Garden’s dumpster down the street. That game
we called the Crash and Splash—to crack those

plastic spheres like eggs, or crack the rounded rocks
we drove their 14 pounds against, whichever
hard thing gave up first. But it was us split bored
for suppertime, and there they lie, lead coconuts,

two eyes, a nose, no mouth. And the black bass—
another fish they probably aren’t—wind their urgent
way around our monument to mess, oblivious.
My only tackle is a hook and line still tangled

at the top. Bait’s a stale slice of bread I told my
daddy would be fed to ducks. I drop the 12-pound
line from the footbridge, knot wound around my
middle finger tight. Nothing bites. I add more bread

and cast again. Mike runs off to make a spear,
but dumbass Dave dives in—not like a swimmer,
though, like a baserunner into home, horizontal
hydroplane and arms outstretched, every scrawny

inch of him engaged in reaching for the fish,
which scatter all at once to gone. But one of those
white wakes barrels into the open end of an upturned
shopping cart. Thrashes in its cage, headlong into

the lichen-covered bars. By the time I climb down
to meet him, Dave’s already dragged the frantic mass
by the tail to the nearest bank. We gather there
to watch it die. It dies. What next?

2
                                                                      Here comes
Sarah Young, middle-aged mother of three, a teller
at a bank all day handling money that isn’t hers,
fingers cracked and calloused from the counting

of crisp new bills and crumpled notes, all of it dusted
with blood and coke, I heard, and dirt from the street,
grease from an engine well, and sweat, and saliva
somehow, some of them hungry enough they’re

licking it, and she’s always got a cold, always sniffing
fumes from hand-sanitizer that stings her papercuts.
She’s climbing up the asphalt drive in a stationwagon.
Heat of the day another weight upon her. The dread

of dinner-work—but at least her boys are home from
summer camp. Great boys—a little slow, perhaps, but wise,
their only crime is too much kindness. And think on that
as six paces from the box she hits the stench of what’s

been baking there since noon. Rotten flesh, dissected
with a stick, both eyes gone, their blackened pits
still glaring. A feast of flies grazes on the wet slop
that’s leaking through a shredded grocery bag,

and soaking her electric bill. But here is where she
doesn’t flinch or vomit in a bush. No bile dripping
down her chin, no pallor, sudden horror at our gift.
Here is where she doesn’t turn to mark each little

monster’s house, or look for signs she’s being watched.
Instead she sighs and waits a beat, then goes inside
to fetch her rubber gloves.

3
                                                        Or six months later,

her husband John, an engineer at the camera plant,
his last vacation before the layoffs, downsizing like
a new disease, and it’s been snowing off and on for days,
but he’s got a dozen rolls of Bermuda in his bag,

and a blazing tan to prove it, his family half-asleep
from the six-hour flight, and the drive home’s been
his for humming. Endless banks of white from the plows
like mountains in the moonlight—scalably small

and only seeming inhospitable. One last glass of port
and then to bed, he thinks, seeing the glow of his own
porch light. Driveway’s dark, the snowpack two feet deep,
but the wagon’s already been through hell and back.

He guns it. See the bumper’s rusty prow puff up
proud before slamming into the icy wall we laid,
layer by layer with a garden hose last week. The sound
is loud enough to wake the neighbors down the street.

But John’s a stubborn man, and puts it in the reverse.
Four more tries until the engine dies. Each Young
so still they can hear the faintest ticking of a fluid
dripping from the car. They stare ahead with faces

that are merely flesh. Until the father opens his door,
and one by one the Youngs ascend in silence—father,
then mother, then son, then son, then son—the Buick
splayed across the icy bank like the carcass of a buck.