He scales the fence, hops easily, shoe soles sinking
against sandpaper shingles, sun in his reddening shirt.
I follow, not-so-quick, but still, I let the undersides of
my fingers lose skin cells at the hand of the rough roof.
Then he slams a coke bottle down onto residential
gravel. It shatters with a clink. The sugary vessel
could not have fallen more than ten feet, but the force
reverberates–inclines us off the roof, ankles flinching.
My palms brush grass tips, the fuzzy sides of bees.
Horse legs carry us across the yard, my brother and I.
A low-hanging branch has long been chainsawed, but
still, I recoil at the empty space, and veer sharply left.
I was birthed approximately thirty feet from here, and
so was he. We've grown faster, the backyard shrunk.
Squirrels shrivel behind the thicker branches. The big
picture: lawn of weeds, shattered bottle, stained siding.
Season with mosquito wings, and we've made it home.
We love like we crawled from the same stretched uterus
onto the same wood floors. He is the primordial memory.
We are shards from one bottle, leaves off a single tree.
Natalia Coronado-Mercer (she/her) is a high school sophomore. Her favorite bands are Nouns and Rush. She lives in Virginia near the river but loves olive oil like an Italian. Her only previous publication was a piece in her high school’s literary magazine, which she helps to create.
"Coke Security" by mikecogh is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
