#robert busby

By Robert Busby.

This was Wednesday afternoon, hours before the sky ripped open and five inches of ice poured out. Bodock Middle School had let out early amid the threat. There was concern of late bus routes, the only thing between the precious cargo and slick roads being drivers ill-accustomed to navigating such. The brothers had rushed home to use the extra time before dinner to continue wearing the new off a pair of pellet guns, their X-Men and Batman backpacks nipping like terriers at their legs as they sprinted down Main Street and skated across a Jitney Jungle parking lot already heaving with the vehicles of weather-panicked shoppers. Behind the grocery store they had taken a narrow four-wheeler trail carved during the previous summer. The trail brought them to the point in their backyard where the emu pen brushed the woods. Their father had referred to the lofty birds as the redneck cousins of ostriches and had invested much money in the fowl for their eggs and steaks. Now, the pen was a chain-linked skeleton. Their father, intoxicated one night in the month after that brief market had collapsed, had freed the emu to fend for themselves...[more]