Bill Brymer

Wheel

The day after the wind storm
and the heavy rains had tapered off,
a large tree let go, groaning as it fell
across St. Matthews Avenue,
crushing beneath its thick trunk
a boy who’d been riding his bike
up and down the sidewalk —
a rooster tail of mud and rainwater
on the back of his cotton shirt.

Someone called 911, a fire truck
arrived quickly but there was nothing to be done.
A jack was used to free the boy,
a chainsaw to cut up the tree,
the noise of which drew more onlookers
to the crowd that had been steadily gathering
over the past hour.

A neighbor, an elderly widower,
claimed the broken bike
thinking he’d return it to the boy’s parents.
Six months later it was still
in his garage, wedged between
tomato cages and a pet gate
that had been set aside for junk day.

The bike had a sticker on the handlebars
of a trollish monster whose obscenely long tongue
was spotted with warts and dollops of green saliva.
The sticker had begun to fade.

After a short service,
attended by aunts and uncles,
a pair of the grieving parents’ closest friends,
the boy was buried in the newer part of the cemetery
where the inscriptions on the stones
can still be read.

Little Monsters

Steven Davenport got his wonky eye
when a bottle rocket exploded in his face
down in the woods at the end of the street
where the gang played war with roman candles
and cherry bombs, the affected pupil
leaking a pillowy darkness like octopus ink.

We boys had to agree it was the perfect shot —
no one would take credit for it, considering —
and some of us felt sorry for Steven,
even if his crying and Rorschach eye
got us all in trouble later, some of us grounded,
some of us looked at by our parents
through a gauze of concern.

Steven came back to sixth grade
wearing a khaki-colored patch over the wound,
and seemed to take it all in stride:
wiping boogers on the underside of his desk,
getting yelled at in the lunch line,
imagining what Señora Douglas looked like
beneath her shapeless dresses —
a regular kid, just slightly damaged.

Steven’s family moved away over the summer
and no one gave him a second thought
until we had children of our own
who push each other down and laugh,
and devise cruel ways to torment one another,
who dare us through dark eyes
that would swallow us whole
if we were to look into them too long.

Bill Brymer is a writer and photographer in Louisville, Ky. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee whose work has appeared in New Plains Review, Sky Island Journal, Pegasus, Poetry South, LexPoMo, Yearling and Barely South Review. His chapbook, Bird on a Wire, was recently named a finalist in the 2024 Wolfson Press Chapbook Contest.

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