Spoil

For hours now the grownups had kept at it: a scarcely modulated piano roll of talk as steady as an all-day rain. At last we bolted out the back where the corn came almost to the door, the tassels shining like epaulets in the late afternoon sun. We bushwhacked through the knobby- kneed ranks, crouched in weedless furrows to burst from cover with rebel yells & Hollywood whoops of the wounded

until someone let loose with a scream that sounded too real– Vultures! Barely missing us as they sailed out from a ragged knot of trees we hadn’t counted on: three, six, then ten or more immense black pairs of wings, each dangling a shrunken head, red with glassy yellow eyes as empty as outer space. They hung so close they must’ve risen on the air sucked out of our lungs. Then the smell hit us.

Alone, anyone would run. But being a threesome we had to brave it, couldn’t go back with half a story.

The smell wasn’t hard to track: a dry sinkhole big enough to swallow a tractor–the reason that patch of woods remained unplowed– had trapped a cow. Its bloated hide bounced our bold missiles like a trampoline. We tested its tautness with ever larger rocks until, one by one, like gleeful privateers we leaped or scrambled down, unable to resist such bounty. Now

the foreshortened sky had no more room for vultures. We danced on the carcass of a dragon–a woolly mammoth–the last dinosaur! And the sunlight scaled the hole’s lip & slipped away through the corn while we shouted & argued over the provenance of this wondrous foe we had so clearly vanquished.