The Blackbirds in Lime Rock, Connecticut

And it was after my older brother Lyle leaned on his elbow and socked me in the eye, everything turning to blobs of ink on white paper. It was after we decided to lie in the grass near the old burn pit in our backyard and watch them swoop like we used to with our old man, long before his heart finally collapsed and smoldered while our mother remarried then remarried then remarried, the smell of embers and blood still fresh in the ground. It was after Lyle told me his unit had been called up and he was going to Nevada for six weeks of Basic and then God knows where after that, maybe someplace dry—barren. It was after he said he was going to miss seeing the rusty blackbirds fill the sky, after he said he was going to miss a lot of things around here as I wondered if he was looking at me. It was after I called him a baby killer, something I had learned from my friend Ronnie while our seventh-grade history class was studying the Vietnam War, thinking that would keep him from going, unaware of how a few months later Lyle would be nothing more than an outline in the grass next to me, a green ghost. It was after he told me to let drugs be. To stay out of alcohol. Plant my skinny ass in school. Keep my dick in my pants. Cut Mom and her new husband a break. Don’t give our dad’s soul any more grief. And it was after all this, unsure if the dots above were birds, that I turned to him and whispered, Lyle, I’m glad we’re brothers.

Nick Ostdick is in the MFA program at Southern Illinois University, where he also teaches. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Margins, Annalemma, Storyglossia, Night Train, Pindeldyboz, and elsewhere, and his story “The Sleeping Shags” was a 2007 StorySouth Notable Story. Sometimes he has a beard.