Belly sick in the backseat. Fourth week waiting on rain and the boys are fighting over a magazine and your father grips the wheel. He’s just sold off the last of the cattle. You see the slick hairs on the backs of his hands. A gray cow pony lurches along the gravel shoulder and the boys’ voices raise like bells jangling out of tune. You pass the empty field where Little Bos used to stand in the swelling cattails, tail swishing. You remember the velvet of her knobby spine under your hand. You roll onto your side on the way back, fingering the frayed upholstery. Your fingers are the cattails in the wind. One of the boys hits the other. You hear the dull smack of heavy flesh. Your father pulls over too fast. A gas station sits sagging, picnic tables seem to hold it up from the outside. You wonder what holds you up from the outside. The men from the station take off their hats but do not speak. Wild brush stretches out in every direction, the tips bending. Your father turns to one boy. “Get out,” he says in the thick silence. “You wanted to fight. Now you’ll fight.” They push open the door, the wind lifting their hair off their foreheads, parting it all wrong, the stinking asphalt glistening. 

Your father was shot once at an A&W. The other guy started it. It was a snub nose revolver that hit him. Bullet went clear through his arm, he told us. You think of that little tearing. You think of that moving through wet flesh. You think of Little Bos lined up with the others, fear in her watery eyes. “I’m not going to fight you, Mike,” my other brother says. These things happen when water costs more than diesel and your father has had enough. The wheat stalks bloomed into dusty husks. You haven't grown since last year either. Your father exhales back into the driver’s seat. You weigh the strength it would take to lift the hatch and run. Or stay, and be dragged somewhere where there’s no out. You push a pebble through a groove on the floor where you sit, wondering why mothers bother having babies with men like your father. You stay small. Make yourself a pebble, smaller even. So small you could grind into dust, mix with the wind. So small you could float up up past the gray to the canopy of stars.

You are a star now, burning out, so when the truck starts up again, you move fast, pop the glass, throw your weight over the metal hutch, the blast of hot air against your skeleton, your hands leaving prints of heat. You run to the tallgrass where you can creep, your body growing lighter with every step. Cooler. Are you the husk? The pebble?
Are you the bullet?