The smell of chemically burnt skin and screams wake me up. I look out my bedroom window and see three people getting smaller and smaller as they run away, mom seeping out of the glass shed. Find a glass repair and call them, I yell as I run past Mitch at the breakfast table, his mouth full of breakfast cereal.
I walk over to the part of the glass shed mom seeps from, notice four rocks on the ground. I pick up one of them and see a hint of glass on the stone. I just wanted to thank them, mom says. I put layer after layer of duct tape over the crack, ask mom to stay calm, to stay put. Mom calms down and she thins herself down to a fine mist.
They should be here this afternoon, I hear Mitch say behind me, his voice not muffled by a containment suit. I’m hoping whoever threw those rocks doesn’t live in this neighborhood, doesn’t have parents old enough to believe their version of what happened.
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Biography
J. Bradley is the author of The Adventures of Jesus Christ, Boy Detective (Pelekinesis, 2016) and the Yelp review prose poem collection Pick How You Will Revise A Memory (Robocup Press, 2016). He lives at jbradleywrites.com.
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Image: Jilbert Ebrahimi
