Armadillos by Nicholas Mainieri

Most of the time we’re happy to sacrifice for those we can’t help but love, and if not, we rationalize ourselves into it. And to know what a child needs in the moment he needs it is such a rare gift.

This is an oversimplification, but when I think about my favorite kinds of stories, they often fall into one of two categories — those that feel like something I might write (and I’m jealous I didn’t, and how good they are), and those that feel like something I’d never think of (and I’m jealous I can’t, and how good they are). The last few SSL stories — Jim Kourlas’ “High Slopes,” Mike McClelland’s “Not Another Time L∞p!,” “Shane Kowalski’s “I Hope You Are Happy,” Debbie Graber’s “Tom Stucker” — have fallen in that latter category. “Where did that come from??” I find myself asking, both to myself and to the author’s themselves, in the bonus content interviews.

“Midwest dad fiction… about parenthood and nostalgia and fear and the mortal trials of backyard maintenance. It's a bit of a slow burn but I think it's true,” Nick said, when submitting today’s story, squaring it firmly in that first, “something I might write (and I wish I had/could)” category. I’ve been a fan of Mainieri’s for year (I believe Hobart was his very first publication??), and this story is evidence of so much of why — familiar themes presented in new ways, framed through clear, crisp, smart prose that grabs you and pulls you into the story and makes you (makes me, certainly!) go, “yes, yes, I hadn’t thought of that before, or hadn’t thought of it like that, or hadn’t been able to put it in those words, but holy shit yes!”

—Aaron Burch

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My sister’s first child had been born so I drove to O’Hare and flew home to New Orleans on the last flight in order to meet my nephew the next morning. I felt both regret and nostalgia as I cruised our old neighborhood in my rental car—three years before this, I’d relocated my family to the Midwest for a position at a different university—and when I checked into the hotel attached to my sister’s hospital it finally occurred to me that this was the same hospital where my own son had been born. In the morning I went up to my sister’s room and rocked her boy while she and her husband dozed. My nephew wore a red puffy face and slept until the nurse came in and woke everyone up.

“Hospital’s on lockdown, honey,” the nurse said to my sister, then looked at me as though I’d done something. “You’ll be the last visitor.”

“Shit,” my brother-in-law said. “It’s happening then?”

They’d had an idea but not much time to check the news during my sister’s long labor. I’d been skittish with current events for their sake, a misstep. No escaping the fact that they were parents now, too, citizens of the same unsparing enterprise. I sought an adequate yet concise summation of the accelerating crisis: “Even the NBA has postponed the rest of the season.”

“Will you call Mom,” my sister asked, her eyes half-lidded where she lay in the hospital bed, “and tell her not to come out later?”

“Sure,” I said. My nephew stretched his body, fists scrunched alongside his face.

“Mom was here yesterday at least,” my sister said. “If you’ve gotta have a baby, the eve of a global health crisis must be better than whatever comes next, right?”

Even in childhood I could never emulate her positivity.

I flew back to Chicago that evening. The O’Hare terminal was a desolate perversion of itself, a cavernous space softly thundering with the rolling luggage of mute travelers in surgical masks. An abandoned, automated piano inside a vacant wine bar tip-toed through “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing,” three months beyond Christmas. I wondered about the end of the world and whether the ironic whims of a self-aware pianola were enough to finally unmoor me.

A couple hours later I swung into the driveway of our northern Indiana home, cutting my headlights so as to not wake Ollie with the high beams across his bedroom window. The roots of the towering black walnut in our front yard cradled a last scrim of snow. The rest had melted in the two days I’d been gone. I worried about the thaw and a flooding basement, the one consistent threat in our obscenely safe neighborhood. I had become so unguarded here, in fact, that I sometimes forgot to close our garage door at night. But nobody had ever entered our home nor the cars, nor touched the still-unpacked boxes nor the dusty tools nor the bicycles. I knew that ease and security are good things, generally speaking. But, privately, I questioned the long-term efficacy of a place that refused to correct my carelessness.

Our dark kitchen twinkled with LED status lights—the router, the microwave, the programmable coffee pot. During Ollie’s extraordinarily sleepless first years, when I would pace our New Orleans house with him rolling in my arms like a little jabbering alligator, he’d point at the glowing icons on the refrigerator and hoot—there were buttons to push! But tonight, in Indiana, he had already gone to sleep beside Nell in our bed, so I stood a moment in the bedroom doorway, listening to my family breathe. Earl, our dog, also snored. Sweet old guy couldn’t bother to investigate who had entered his house at three a.m. Earl had grown lazy here, as well, complacently stinking up our bedroom.

When we’d brought Ollie home from the hospital in New Orleans, I’d gotten him and Nell and our things into the house, but I’d forgotten to lock the car out on the curb. The next morning, I carried Ollie outside, strapped into his portable car seat for some tests back at the hospital. Some desperate thief had left the car doors wide open in his haste to get away. Papers from the glove box were blown across our crab-grass lawn. A smudged handprint seemed to glow on the dash. In the end the burglary was nothing of huge consequence, except in one way: I learned how parenthood turns every manner of threat instantly personal, and every mistake which invites it worthy of self-condemnation.

Ollie, awake at six in the morning, came looking for me. I heard him before opening my eyes, his feet pattering through the house. He’d assumed I might be up early, writing in the kitchen. Once he checked his own bedroom, however, he shouted, incredulous: “Dad, you’re in my bed!”

“Oh no,” I said. “I don’t think I remember how to get up.”

“Da-ad.” He was five years old. “OK, listen. Step one. Take off the covers.” He pulled them down as he said this and started grabbing at my shirt. “Step two. Sit up. OK. You’ve got it. Put your legs over here. Now stand up. You can do it, Dad. Don’t ever give up.”

I piggybacked him into the kitchen. Outside the window a small creature darted, a pale flash, in the barren tangle of our predawn backyard. Ollie helped me with the coffeemaker, spooning grounds with deep concentration, his tongue clenched between his teeth.

He said, “Jellyfish are invertebrates.”

“Are they now?”

“The box jelly can kill a person in five minutes, Dad. Five.” He splayed fingers.

 “I’m going to make you a box jellyfish pancake for breakfast.”

“Not for real though?”

“I’ll hold the poison.”

“You can’t touch the poison, Dad.”

“I mean there won’t be any poison in the pancake.”

“Deal,” Ollie said.

Nell entered the kitchen shortly afterward, buffing her glasses on her pajama shirttail as she appraised the roughly mushroom shape I’d poured into the skillet. I transferred the pancake to a plate and shredded the stem into tentacles.

“Not bad, eh?”

She patted my back and got herself a coffee mug.

I put on PAW Patrol for Ollie and brought his breakfast to the couch. Mayor Goodway called Ryder and his pups to help save Chicakaletta, the stupid chicken who had marooned itself on a cliff ledge.

While Nell and I drank coffee at the kitchen table beneath the backyard window she told me that her weekend classes had been cancelled (she taught yoga, Pilates, and meditation at a nearby studio), and while the owners hadn’t announced a complete closure yet, she was sure it was coming. I told her about my nephew and sister and the weird airport, the seemingly self-aware piano and its apocalyptic taste in music. I described the economy parking shuttle at O’Hare, how we riders clutched our bags to our laps and glanced at each other as if we might spy the red filaments of virus snaking on our exhalations. I told her, too, how I’d driven by our old house the other night, how great the place had looked. The new owners had dug flowerbeds and planted shapely boxwoods along the front walkway. I’d felt an envious twinge, and even more so now, as morning light filtered through our unruly Indiana backyard. Oaks, maples, sycamores rose out of sight, looming over the roof, the eaves. Cliques of hibiscus-like trees as tall as basketball hoops begat thickets of shin-high saplings (my neighbor Brian, who was good with his yard, called these “rose-of-Sharons” and acknowledged their tenacity). Underneath it all was a carpet of matted rotting leaves, everything I hadn’t raked before the snow had piled up. A squirrel appeared on a stump and scratched itself doglike with a hind paw.

“I think,” I told Nell, “it’s time I reasserted dominance over the backyard.”

“There is certainly a lot of frozen dog crap back there,” she said.

“Is it a fair estimate,” I asked, “to say there are millions of leaves on the ground?”

“Definitely.”

“If we let them be, how long would it take for them to turn into soil or be eaten by worms? Like, how can we make those leaves work for us, by doing nothing at all preferably?”

“I suppose,” Nell suggested, “there is the cardiovascular benefit of raking them.”

“Hey, Ollie, you wanna help your old dad rake some leaves today?”

“Uh huh,” he replied mechanically from beneath the television.

“Jesus,” I said to Nell, my eyes on PAW Patrol, “would you look at this dipshit Ryder? Acting like he’s something. Are you telling me that Marshall, a dog who can drive a fucking fire truck, wouldn’t know to extend his ladder to Chickaletta without Ryder’s order to do so?”

Nell smiled, sort of.

“In fact,” I said, “the pups probably waste precious time in emergency situations simply waiting for the little jerk’s blessing. Chickaletta could’ve plummeted to her death by now. Oh, look at this, that chicken’s barely hanging on. Ryder’s worse than worthless. He’s harmful!”

“I suppose you’ll be defending Mayor Humdinger next.”

“Though,” I challenged myself, “the PAW Patrol are pups, aren’t they? They’re probably pretty obedient. Maybe they physically can’t do anything without Ryder’s permission.”

“Perhaps,” Nell said.

“Then again, they are dogs who can talk, so—”

“Hey.” Nell nodded out the window. “No backyard is too big, no dad is too small.”

Earl followed me around while I gathered grocery-bagfuls of his lightly thawed shit. He was a brindle boxer whose brown-and-black coat had aged to brown and ghost-gray. He perpetually winked, having lost an eye the year before, running into a low tree branch when he chased a critter through our backyard underbrush. He panted, smiled, winked, then took his morning dump only after I’d gathered the last of his chilled turds. In his youth, Earl had cornered possums in our New Orleans backyard. He’d killed one of them. Another had lain there bleeding, apparently deceased, but while I retrieved the shovel it shook from its coma and slunk away.

Our Indiana yard was home to cottontails who in summer evenings steadily munched the rows of hostas leftover from a previous owner’s now-defunct landscaping. And once a month or so, a Cooper’s hawk would land within our fence to rip apart some mammal. We’d seen a fox once, a swift copper blur. The horde of chipmunks were the worst, and I suspected that their tunnels along our foundation bolstered our basement’s propensity for flooding. Even now the basement pump worked against the thaw, the sump discharge gurgling as it fanned snowmelt across a corner of the yard. Robins, jays, and cardinals bathed in it like a wave pool. In summers I’d catch fleeting glimpses of highlighter-neon orioles. Yellow-bellied sapsuckers left uncanny grids of pencil-thick holes in tree trunks. Last summer, Ollie had discovered a putrefying raccoon carcass beneath the tarp weighted atop the firewood; he’d followed the flies to the thing and was thrilled. We lived alongside skunks, too, because the groundhogs were fat lousy pushovers who let them cohabit their dens—a factoid we learned when Earl had stuck his one-eyed face into a hole along the back fence.

Now Earl was too cold, so he scratched at the back door for Nell to let him inside. My neighbor Brian, across our fence, fired up his leaf blower, one of those jet-pack types with a joystick and trigger. The thing roared. Brian loved using it, I could tell, and there was a badass element to it, being honest. Brian’s eldest, Gary, had a rake in hand and worked the corners of their yard. Gary was eight and extraordinarily kind to Ollie, three years his junior. Most of the year, Brian flew an Indianapolis Colts banner on his flagpole out front. In the spring he swapped it for a checkered flag in honor of the Indy 500. I liked Brian, his Midwest born and bred ways, his earnestness. He managed the restaurant at a good smokehouse and brewery in town, and nights when I taught evening classes I’d stop by his bar on my way home and have a closing beer with him. Otherwise, we mostly hung out during kid time, which Ollie asked for frequently because he obsessed over the playroom at their house, full of vintage Star Wars and G.I. Joe figurines, toys that had been in Brian’s possession for decades. He was a sentimental guy, I suppose. Case in point, Brian was wearing a faded Minnesota North Stars sweater, baggy in the way only hockey jerseys can be. He throttled down his leaf blower and met me at the fence.

“Who’s older?” I asked. “You or that sweater?”

His eyes ran around the yard behind me. “This cleanup will take you all spring, man.”

“You know, Brian, I favor the hands-off approach for most of the year. I trust Mother Nature, is what I’m saying. It’s a spiritual philosophy. A calling, really.”

He said, “You’re the chipmunk hero on the neighborhood message board, aren’t you?”

I had a basic understanding of the neighborhood app and forum due to its email spam, but the chipmunk hero amongst us was news. Brian opened the app on his phone and handed it to me. Within a thread entitled best way to kill lots of chipmunks?, our neighbors debated various methods of extermination, the most popular seeming to be a kind of baited seesaw above a half-full bucket of water—the chipmunks would fall in and drown overnight. One gentle soul had finally challenged our neighbors’ bloodthirstiness, asking whether it was really so difficult to coexist with the creatures. The wolves really came out, however, once the chipmunk hero referred to the animals as “friends.” Among the absolutely merciless responses was a photo of little furry corpses afloat within the rim of a red bucket from hardware superstore Menards.

“Goodness,” I said. “You really don’t hear enough about the mortal consequences of backyard maintenance, do you?”

“Speaking of,” Brian replied, and he offered to let me borrow his leaf blower. I declined, however. I was vaguely nervous to shoulder the pack he’d been sweating in, not knowing how the virus worked yet, but the excuse I offered was that I raked for exercise as much as anything. He gave me a funny glance, like he was formulating a wisecrack, but then I asked about his restaurant’s contingency plan—would his business have to shutter, essentially. He said the owners were waiting on a city, county, or state directive, and that they had a staff meeting that night to discuss. I gathered he was worried about a furlough or worse. Brian thrust his chin toward his son Gary, who raked around the skirt of an evergreen, and said, “But this will be hardest for them, don’t you think, if they can’t play together?”

Ollie was pretty good with difficult news, actually. Most kids are better at absorbing tough developments than we imagine they are. They’re naturals at sniffing out mendacious bullshit, and they want to understand. Ollie, I thought, would be more curious than anything.

I called hello to Gary, who drifted closer. He was wearing a hoodie stamped with faded lettering: stephen king rules.

“Wow,” I said, “that has to have been your dad’s from a long time ago, huh?”

Gary’s smile contained teeth that were still too large for the rest of him.

“You ever seen The Monster Squad?”

Gary shook his head and looked to his dad.

“Not yet,” Brian said, “but it’s on our list, huh?”

“Can Ollie come play later?” Gary asked me.

I stammered out an answer, that we’d have to see, and Gary’s brow briefly furrowed, sensing my own inescapable disingenuousness.

“Come on, Gary,” Brian said. “After we finish our leaves maybe we’ll help him with his. All the leaves in our yard probably used to belong to his trees anyway, right?”

I muscled sodden leaves into piles that would later require bagging. Normally, in the autumn, one could rake his leaves to the curb for the county to hoover up with giant trucks, but I’d gotten busy and then I capitulated with the first snow. In truth, Nell and Ollie had handled our first Midwestern winters better than I had. They enjoyed the snow, the cold, the hunkering-down-ness of it. But me, as I listened to the sump pump’s rhythmic sloshing, I worried about flooding. We had to make an insurance claim our very first winter here, when a freak February thunderstorm came down atop two feet of standing snow, all the water overrunning our pump and injecting several inches of muddy slush into our basement and the workings of the boiler, water heater, and air conditioner.

I raked beneath a tall rose-of-Sharon outside our kitchen window, applying necessary violence against the fused sheets of decaying leaves. A dinner-plate-sized chunk broke free and revealed a gray and furry blob that began to bulge and squirm in the sudden cold. My stomach winced. This writhing, rippling mass had no immediate reference in my memory. It chirped, quiet hiccups like muted ukulele strings. I leaned close and used my phone to take a video, damn me and my era on earth. Black ants streamed through the blob’s fur. It’s not difficult, not really, to identify a living thing’s preference for different circumstances, and whatever this thing was, I’d clearly done it harm with the rake.

The ants, and the pain I perceived, reminded me of a featherless purple martin chick that had fallen from a tree to land alongside a fire ant nest in our New Orleans backyard. The ants had run all over its broken, pink body. I put it out of its misery with a shovel. I’d used a shovel, as well, to gather the possum Earl had killed. The putrefying racoon Ollie had discovered, scooped with a shovel. And when we were kids, my sister and I one day witnessed a squirrel fall stone-dead from an oak tree; we ran inside and our mother told us to get the shovel. Shovelfuls of dead animals. Mammals were always heavier than I’d imagined.

I watched the furry blob writhe and realized, gradually, that it was not a single mammal but rather a kind of fur cocoon. A rounded, pink snout thrust free. It sunk away and another appeared. The fur cocoon began to break apart as the babies kicked and mewled.

Nell tapped on the window glass above me.

“Baby rabbits,” I hollered.

Moments later, Ollie ran out of the backdoor in his rubber boots. He squatted beside me and said, “Whoa,” and put his face incredibly close to the rabbit nest.

I loved him so much. He never hesitated to pick up a worm or toad or beetle or salamander. He got into the water of our neighborhood creek and fished for minnows and grasped at frogs. He was recklessly enthralled with the earth around him while I often paralyzed myself beneath spectra of abstract apprehensions. For instance:

Ollie reached to touch the rabbits but I didn’t know if he should.

I supposed there could be some bacterial threat, or risk for the rabbits themselves. And yet, if I stopped Ollie, would I foster in him a useless deference? The mere thought of enervating his natural wonder and fearlessness was heartbreaking. Nor would it do him much good in life. But if I did nothing, if I remained silent, would I enable a careless overconfidence? Would I seed an inability to anticipate outcomes? And further, was this anesthetizing schism within myself the very disposition with which I’d lost my grip on this entire backyard, among other more personal things (such as the gradual sclerosis of physical romance in my marriage)?

“Hang on,” I decided, reaching to halt Ollie. “I don’t think these guys are ready to be touched.”

Ollie wanted to keep them and raise them as pets.

I sought an answer, something honest.

“Hey, do you remember the armadillos?”

“No,” he said with a quizzical lilt, lifting his face from the rabbits.

He had barely been a year old, in New Orleans. During those sleepless nights with my son I learned how frequently our backyard’s motion-sensing floodlight turned on. I’d take Ollie to the back window to part the blinds and catch what had tripped the sensor. Usually the culprit was a stray cat or a family of racoons. One time it was a man, stealing my bicycle. This time, however, it had been two armadillos, little humps trundling through the grass. They shoved their armored faces into the ground and ploughed for food. Ollie put his hands flat against the window while I held him. He babbled and pointed. For several weeks, we nightly saw the armadillos. Days following, we’d explore the torn furrows they’d left in the crabgrass.

While we hovered over the baby rabbits I explained to Ollie that we could never go outside when the armadillos were also out there. We couldn’t touch them.

“Why?”

“Because I learned that armadillos carry a disease called leprosy.”

“What’s leopardsy?”

“It makes bad things happen to a person’s body.”

“Oh,” Ollie said, hunching closer to the rabbits. “Do bunnies have leopardsy?”

“I don’t think—well, what I mean is I don’t know the consequences of touching them.”

“One touch, Dad. I’ll be careful.” And before I could respond he jabbed through the disentangling fur cocoon with his index finger. Then he held up his hand and laughed. “I did it!”

“OK,” I said. “Well, what did it feel like?”

“Warm!”

“The rabbits look uncomfortable to me,” I said. “Maybe we should cover them back up.”

We gathered the fur and set it gently back over them. Then we placed leaves atop the nest. The rabbits abruptly stilled, and I felt as though we’d done the right thing.

“Let’s go wash our hands,” I said.

“I’m gonna tell Mom first,” Ollie answered, sprinting toward the door.

After Ollie was asleep that night, Nell and I played Scrabble at the kitchen table. Earl snored on the living room couch. I drank a bourbon. Nell rarely drank anymore but once upon a time she’d been able to drink me under the table. Those were days when we lived in walking distance of bars we liked and our conversations could carry us till three or four in the morning.

Our move to Indiana had not been a slam-dunk decision. Our families were still in Louisiana and we loved New Orleans, our home, but we were new parents and I had a good job offer with better benefits. Nell had said to me, Look, we know what we’ve got here, but we don’t know what we’ll have in Indiana, and she’d meant it in an adventurous, inspiring way. We had joked, I remember, that in Indiana we wouldn’t have cockroaches at least. Of course, once we got to the Midwest, we had mice instead, discovering droppings in Ollie’s toy bins because of the crusted remains of food hand-printed onto his LEGOs. I’d finally stonewalled the mice at the basement stairs with a mixture of poisons and traps, but the stalemate seemed intractable; I still found their shit all over the basement. Time went on, and I’d not settled in. Nell, however, had made friends and found communities of cool, like-minded people. Similar to my sister, she’d always been more inherently optimistic than me, and I was starting to consider how I easily fell prey to notions of the next place, the next job. Perhaps I was incapable of being wherever I was, incapable of valuing the local as opposed to the distant, the unknown. Maybe this, too, explained the state of our backyard (and other things).

Nell considered her Scrabble letters. I incessantly refreshed my phone’s news app. Tomorrow’s doubt was no more explicit than yesterday’s, but I couldn’t resist the way my intangible dread became tactile in the swiping of my phone screen. Futile but locomotive.

Nell’s face jumped. Then she cringed, smiled, and said, “Sorry,” placing the word V-I-R-U-S-E-S across a triple-word score. She’d used all her final letters in a buzzer-beating bonanza. We laughed and she made a V for Virus sign. I got up for another drink and when I returned to the table she was squinting into the darkness of our backyard.

“Think those rabbits are all right?” she asked.

I didn’t know. “I didn’t get far with the leaves either. The ticks will be bad this spring. We’ll have to check Ollie every time he comes in. Earl, too.”

“And us.”

“Yes, and us.”

“We’ll all be home together more, at least, with you teaching online.”

“I plan to become a very generous grader,” I said.

“Unprecedented times,” Nell said.

“I bet that’s a phrase we won’t get sick of.”

Nell grinned. “We’re already luckier than a lot of people.”

“Yes. Can’t forget that.”

“Can we do the dishes together?” she asked.

I washed, she dried. We stood next to each other at the sink. We didn’t speak, engaged together in an unambiguous task with a definitive terminus. It was a nice chore. Intimate, even. We dried our hands and embraced in the quiet kitchen. Grateful, tired. A possibility glimmered, but then Ollie called out for his mom from his bedroom, where he was suddenly awake and afraid in the dark. I wasn’t bitter. Most of the time we’re happy to sacrifice for those we can’t help but love, and if not, we rationalize ourselves into it. And to know what a child needs in the moment he needs it is such a rare gift that we don’t question it. But the parallel truth is also sobering: what we postpone or forego cannot always count on another opportunity. I feared this for me and Nell. Still, one has to maintain hope, and hope might require one to limit his private interrogations. He can’t wonder because he can’t afford it.

Nell got into bed with Ollie and held him until she was asleep, too.

In normal times, I would’ve turned on the Pelicans game (my one financial splurge, aside from the liquor cabinet, was the NBA cable package). Instead, I drank more whiskey and watched a nature documentary about the Serengeti. I muted the volume for the incomparable stride of a cheetah in slow motion. The classics never go out of style. I slid into a good drunk.

*

Here’s the thing about armadillos. Shy of shooting them—which wasn’t an option for me—they are incredibly difficult to get rid of. It is not that armadillos are too wily. Far from it. They are simply too blind and too dull to trap. They randomly crisscross yards, seining for grubs, so if you don’t by luck place a trap directly in their path, they’ll never find it. To give yourself a chance at catching them, you have to build a funnel of plywood walls hammered into the earth that taper into the trap. Such stupid creatures. Shortsightedness and dumb luck are their greatest assets. Even the one freakish ability they do have—when startled, armadillos can jump really high relative to their size—becomes a liability. It’s why you see so many armadillos as roadkill, because when a semi-truck passes overhead an armadillo gets scared and jumps directly into the undercarriage. If not for the hard-earned instincts of their 50-million-year-old mammal brains, they’d live.

I was warm and asleep in the corner of the couch when someone rapped sharply on the window above the kitchen table. I leapt armadillo-like to my feet. Brian’s face hovered in the glass. I met him at the back door. He’d come in our side gate having seen the light on, looking for me and hoping not to wake Earl, or by extension, Ollie. Brian wore his dark oxford and slacks from work, but his shirt was untucked and unbuttoned, revealing a vintage Empire Strikes Back T-shirt beneath it. He smelled strongly of hops. I slowly became aware that I was standing too close to him, inhaling his dank beer breath, and when I backed up a step he took it as an invitation to enter, brandishing a four-pack of pint cans in each of his fists. “I brought you a present,” he whispered.

I followed him into my own kitchen and took out glasses. He explained that his brewery ran an automated canning line where the computer program recognized the precise weights of 16 ounces of each of their types of beers. If a canned beer came in underweight, by any amount, then it was deemed a “short-pour” and set aside as unsellable.

“Happens more than you’d think,” Brian said, “and all the short-pours go into their own cases, and the brewery owners give them to us as gifts.”

“I see,” I said.

“But we’re talking like a fraction of an ounce that’s missing, man.” He poured out one of the beers and handed me a pint glass that was less than a finger shy of a full pour. “Look at that,” he said. “That’s not good enough? You kidding me?”

We took our beers to the kitchen table. I knew these craft IPAs were a bad idea on top of my bourbon, but I was not in a state where I could muster refusal; or, maybe, I valued other obligations more, as Brian began describing how he’d come home from work to a sleeping household but needed to talk with someone. The work meeting, he shared, went late, and afterward they’d opened the taps for the staff as a gift—also because they needed to empty them out. The restaurant would be closed for a while. Indefinitely. That was the word.

I didn’t know what to say. I turned again to basketball, as I had with my sister and her husband. “I only remembered tonight that the Pelicans wouldn’t be on anymore.”

He chuckled ruefully. “I’ve gone with my brothers to the Indy Five Hundred for thirty straight years. Streak ends this spring, I bet.”

Our heating system, the boiler, hummed in the floorboards. The beer’s carbonation prickled in my brainstem. I summoned the baby rabbit video on my phone and slid it across the table to him. “Check that out.”

“Oh, jeez,” Brian said. “What did you do?”

“I covered them back up. I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Let’s post this to the neighborhood message board. Ask for advice.”

“Those rabbits are my new friends.”

Brian laughed, then got quiet. “I’m serious, if you want help with the yard, let me know. I’ll have a lot of freaking time on my hands now.”

My brain listed in its brine. Every yard I’d ever been responsible for had been a disaster. I told Brian how Ollie and I used to pace our New Orleans house at night and, like sleep-addled documentarians, watch armadillos dig up the grass. I wondered aloud how’d they found our house in the first place, tucked in the middle of an urban neighborhood, and a bleary prescience swept through my head—I saw, momentarily, how life filled every seam of the earth: the wriggling, translucent beetle larvae Ollie exposed in the dirt with his hand trowel; the spiderwebs studded with desiccated crickets above the flood line in the corners of our basement; the hibernating pill bugs adhered to the undersides of termite-pocked firewood. Every single thing’s space ran against every other’s. Nothing was empty, nothing unused.

“They have leprosy,” I mumbled. “Armadillos.”

“Jeez-us,” Brian said. “It’s the details you don’t know that scare you, huh.”

“Craziest thing,” I said, “is I never did anything about them. I couldn’t decide what the hell to do, and then—poof—they up and vanished. Never saw them again. Like they ploughed on into a neighbor’s yard one night on accident and kept going. I dunno. Can you believe that?”

Brian looked at me and lowered his eyes. He sighed. He said, “Fuck,” and it startled me because he was the kind of guy to choose the word sugar over shit.

“What,” I said.

“What if doing nothing is the answer? And what would that mean?”

I tried to untangle his questions, but he pressed on, opinions lubed.

“I mean all the scary stuff that parachutes in from freaking nowhere. What if you’re not supposed to try and protect your family from it because you have no idea what other problems you’re causing just by trying? Just by moving around? Just by raking the darned leaves?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“But can you really expect problems to up and fix themselves, like those armadillos? Is that all we’re supposed to do? Is that all we’re for, you and me?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Gary’s been getting bullied at school,” he said.

“Oh, Brian.”

“He thinks my old stuff is cool, you know? He loves me so he loves the same stuff I do. And I think it’s cool. Am I supposed to tell him it’s not? I thought Dungeons and Dragons was supposed to be more mainstream these days. Why wouldn’t a vintage D-and-D shirt be cool then, too?” He flicked the tab of a beer can and looked elsewhere. “I really thought Gary would have a better time than I did. But kids, man. They find something, don’t they? I never figured it out. I just got older. So what advice can I possibly give my kid? How can I help him?”

He paused, took two long gulps of beer.

The thermostat clicked and the boiler shut off and the silence bottomed out.

“Anyway,” Brian said. “Schools will close, too. That’s my silver lining, I suppose.”

Something rustled, directly outside the window beside the table. Some creature scuffling in dead leaves. Brian raised a finger toward the sound and mouthed the word rabbits. I put my face to the glass, using my hands as blinders, but it was too dark. Brian illuminated my phone and held it to the window so that the light diffused around the rose-of-Sharon’s trunk, and in the pale blue glow a large possum hunched on its hindquarters. Its fur was spiky, damp. Its eye was blank, flat, black like a shark’s. It was eating something held in its front claws.

Brian and I kicked out our chairs, moving with the same thought.

We sprinted to the backdoor and flung it open. We rounded the corner, running and guarding our faces with our hands as we crashed through the brush, both of us shouting things like, “Hey, you fucker!” and “Get away from there, you little piece of shit!” It was too dark to see anything, but I heard the possum scurry away through the leaves.

Brian turned on the smartphone’s flashlight. From where we stood we couldn’t precisely see the damage, but the leaves covering the nest had certainly been upset. The shredded fluff of the fur cocoon rippled in the air. Brian asked if the possum got them all. I had no clue.

“I don’t wanna go over there,” I said.

“Me neither,” he answered.

The cold night possessed a boundless kind of quiet though you knew it harbored every manner of creature, watching and waiting for what could never be anticipated nor imagined.

We went back inside.

“Mind if I take another beer for the road?” Brian asked. The short-pour nearly filled his glass again. “Can’t hardly tell the difference,” he slurred. “How could this not be good enough?”

I walked him to the door and thanked him and said goodnight. I returned to the kitchen table and waited, thinking I’d hear the possum if it returned. I turned off all the lights and watched through the glass, waiting for my eyes to adjust, but I couldn’t see a damned thing.

My life was not very difficult. I knew this. I made a truthful joke to Nell once that the most challenging event of my life was her labor with Ollie. What I’d meant was that it had been so hard for me and yet infinitely harder for her. Twenty-five hours of labor is another realm of suffering, determination, love—a realm I’d never be able to access. In the end, Ollie had required an emergency caesarian because the umbilical cord had wrapped around his neck. The nurse taught me how to change diapers while Nell recovered. I was frightened, and continued to be. I harbored no aspirations beyond managing the completion of the right, small tasks. I would get in my own way a lot. Before Ollie was even a toddler, I’d wake with him at four or five in the morning and I’d be hungover or half-drunk and would lay on our living room rug while he crawled around on top of me. I was obdurate about what must have been Nell’s postpartum depression. I’d fostered rifts with her I had no clue how to patch. I was luckier than I deserved to be. But if deserves mattered then I guess it wouldn’t have been luck in the first place.

I startled awake. The crunching of leaves. My cheek was numb against the kitchen table. I lit up my phone and looked outside, but it wasn’t the possum. The doe cottontail had returned. She hunched low to the nest, working with her paws. She bent her neck and chewed fur off her own breast, worked it in her mouth, then lowered her face to the nest, spit it out, and patted it down. It was remarkable. I wanted to keep watch, stand guard, bear witness. But then I shook awake again with my phone buzzing on the table. My vertebrae creaked as I straightened. Outside, the rabbit was gone. The nest had disappeared again beneath a smooth floor of leaves. She’d done what she could for whomever was left, and now they needed luck. The text message on my phone had come from my sister in New Orleans, where it was near two in the morning. It read: he wont sleep. I video-called her back and she answered, surprised. I couldn’t see her, no lights on where she was, just a black screen and her voice and my nephew making soft noises. They’d brought him home that afternoon. My sister was letting her husband sleep a few more minutes before she woke him to trade off until the next time their son needed to nurse.

“I’m a little drunk,” I whispered.

“You sound a lot drunk.”

“I’m glad I got to see you,” I said.

“Me, too. We’re home alone now. For a while I bet.”

“That’s a scary drive home with a new human, isn’t it.”

“He slept all day. I should’ve slept, too.”

“I know,” I said. “You’ll be OK.”

“Will we?”

“Yes,” I said. “Just hold him. You’ll be OK.”

“All right,” she said, a long slow breath. “Goodnight, brother.”

I ended the call and sat in the dark.

None of us can see very far.

STORY:
Nicholas Mainieri is the author of the novel The Infinite (Harper Perennial 2016). Most recently, his work has appeared in Belt Magazine, Notre Dame Magazine, The Cincinnati Review, and Best Microfiction 2023 (Pelekinesis Press). You can find him online at nicholasmainieri.com.

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ART:
Nina Semczuk’s writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review, Sinking City Literary Journal, Coal Hill Review, and elsewhere. Her art, pottery, and comics can be found online and around the Hudson Valley. 

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Next Tuesday, we’ll feature an interview with Nick about this story!

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