Blade

I was mowing the lawn so I wouldn’t get beat when my dad got home. I was twelve: still beating age. My brother was fifteen, and if he screwed up, he only got threatened with exile. Many arguments around our place ended with the my-way/highway option.

The blade came off and spun out to the right about ten yards over the cut grass which lay in lines of thick green clumps. The engine screamed, and I had the sense to turn it off. I walked over to the blade and stood over it a while. It was shiny on the edges but dull black over the rest with green juice giving off a sort of sheen. Grass fragments were peppered here and there.

My ears were ringing, as I’d been mowing for an hour straight. We had two acres of lawn. I stood over the blade. Like it was some artifact from an ancient culture. Like it was an injured person with a hurt spine. Don’t move him.

It could have cut my feet off, maybe just one foot, if that bolt or whatever was holding it in there had come off. A millisecond. This isn’t supposed to happen. They have safeguards. Propellers don’t just spin off planes. What would I tell the other kids at school, looking down at me in my wheelchair, footless, fake feet? Maybe my feet were already gone and I was in some sort of shock daydream.

My brother came up from the cow pond where he’d been fishing. He had a stringer of a dozen sunfish. They glistened and the two on top of the stringer were struggling to breathe against the line. The bottom ones were bent stiff.

I looked back at the blade. My brother thought I’d been looking at a dead animal.

“That didn’t . . .”

“Yep, it did.”

He looked at my feet. Then back at the blade. Then he looked back up at the house, two stories, white, looming like God about to speak. Then back at the blade. He dropped the fish and his pole over to the side.

“Blade,” was all he could say. My brother patted me on the back, congratulating me. That’s where I got my nickname.

It was an older mower with the white paint chipped and fading. We turned it over. The sweet smell of cut grass and gasoline filled the air.

Sure enough, there was no blade. A coating of shiny green grass, a heavenly carpet for rabbits, clung to the sides and the top of the mower, except at one place on the side where there was a silver gash. The blade must have struck it there.

We looked all around the mower but couldn’t find the bolts to put it back together. I helped him clean the fish. Since there were so many, he gutted and beheaded them behind the house at the spigot, and I scaled and rinsed. It was all I could do to keep up. Every once in a while he would scale one to keep us working together. Before too long, scales were all over the hose, the siding of the house, my fingers, my arms and face, the board propped on cinder blocks, and the side of the five gallon bucket.

“Dad’s going to wonder why you didn’t finish the lawn.”

“I guess I’ll tell him that I almost got killed so I had to stop.”

“I bet he’ll say that you break everything you touch.”

“No, he’ll just want to know how come I didn’t fix it.”

“Two bucks? Whoever’s closer? You know. To what he says.”

“You’re on.”

We had two fish to go, and he grabbed one. It flopped pointlessly out of my brother’s hand onto the board after giving him a spiny gill in his palm. He stabbed it through the eyeballs to the board and, teeth bared, admonished the fish: “Prickly prick.”

Then he proceeded to cut off its head and clean it as he had done the others. He looked at his hand...