the New Pantagruel

Small Forest Creatures

by L. J. Arensen

ometimes Soren dreams of dying, of his soul rising out of his still body like a bird. A live bird, with hollow bones and a tiny beating heart and feathers at its throat. Not like the birds his brother Gabe kills with a slingshot. Not like those limp bundles with their skulls crushed, their breasts caved in, feathers soaked in dark blood. “A bird’s eyes take up a third of its skull,” Gabe told him once, slicing through a woodpecker’s scalp with his knife and peeling the skin away. A bizarre beaked creature with enormous dark eyes remained. Its sorrowing eyes stared naked and unprotected at Soren in a red mask of sinew and muscle like an exposed soul.

Bones & Flowers by Jim Janknegt

He loves his brother. He always has. He was mad with grief when Gabe first went away to school in Kenya. He would stand and wait at the end of the driveway every afternoon until his mother came outside and found him. “Come inside and play,” she would say. “I’ll show you the school holidays again on the calendar.” But the black boxes she checked off so carefully each morning meant nothing to him and he waited every day until finally his father’s car came winding up the side of the mountain with Gabe leaning out of the window. And then he was so happy he thought he might faint. He pleaded to be allowed to attend boarding school early until his parents acquiesced, just so he could be near him, just so he could hear him laugh. He was sure that Jesus looked just like Gabe, he was sure that Gabe looked just like Jesus. Even now, now that he knows Gabe is nothing like Jesus, he still loves him. Sometimes, when he is entering the dining hall, being jostled and prodded by the other boys, he will feel Gabe’s large hand on his shoulder and his heart will leap like a wild thing. “Hey, kid,” his brother always says, and every time Soren looks up slowly, savoring it, and says, “Hey, Gabe,” and then his brother leans over and scoops him right up, even though he is not a small boy anymore. Gabe lifts him out of the children’s line and into his own. “Stick with me, kid,” Gabe says. “Try and look old.” The boys around him, Gabe’s friends, always laugh. They laugh at everything Gabe says. The other younger boys fall silent and watch in envy when Soren is with Gabe, but he does not care. He does care about anything then; he is perfectly happy, standing with his brother in the dining hall line. Then they reach the food counters and the hall monitor notices him and sends Soren back to his own line, no matter how well Gabe pleads and smiles. Even so, it is enough for Soren, and when he is ordered away he always turns to Gabe and gives him a thumbs up and says, “Better luck next time.” And then they part. He still loves Gabe. But in the afternoons after school when Gabe sometimes comes looking for him, Soren does not want to be found at all. His brother kills things. His brother stalks and traps small animals. He enjoys this. Then he skins them and roasts their flesh over smoky fires with other wiry boys who act as if he is a god, although not a god like Jesus. One day at school Gabe and his friends had come and stolen him away into the forest. “Time to become a man, kid,” Gabe had said. “Are you ready for it?” Soren had thought he was. All that long way down the side of the Great Rift Valley, pushing through briars, leaping over gullies, watching the older boys fiddle with their slingshots and hurl stones into trees to flush the birds, he had thought that he was ready.

“We’re going to Hyrax Cliffs to check the traps,” Gabe said, and Soren had nodded eagerly. “You know what a hyrax is, right?” Soren did. When he still was a small boy, he had extended a lollipop towards a hyrax in a game park and it had bitten his thumb. He did not remember much about the creature itself, but he had a searing recollection of the fiery injections in his belly to protect him from rabies.

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