The Breeders by Katie French Page B

their neck. The horror of that thought haunts me. I hug myself and shiver. I gotta free them. But how?
    My eyes trace the scattered remains of our life strewn around the living room. There’s shards of a ceramic vase, the desert flowers my mother lovingly picked shriveled to husks on the floor. My eyes trace past shreds of our tattered wallpaper. A picture frame, knocked off a sideboard, lies broken on the ground. I pull myself off the couch and pick it up with tender hands.
    The cherry wood frame, dented at the corners, holds the treasure I was seeking. The glass is gone, but the drawing remains. I lift the paper delicately out of the frame. It’s a piece of butcher block with a ten-year-old’s pencil scrawl. To anyone but my mama, it would’ve been trash, but she framed it and set it on the sideboard. Looking at it now brings a tightness to my throat I can’t swallow down.
    The pencil drawing shows five stick figures, each with giant circular heads and grins that cover half their faces. For my mama, I drew a triangle dress and her clutching what looks like a bean with a face—my best effort for baby Ethan. For Arn, I sketched his overalls as uneven rectangles over his stick body. Auntie’s figure has a long rope braid down her back. And for myself, the biggest grin of all plastered on my little circle head.
    My family as I saw it at age ten. I drew this at the kitchen table of the house we lived in six years ago. A thunderstorm crackled overhead and I tried to clamber on my mama’s lap. She kindly pried me off and set the pencil and paper in front of me.
    “Draw something happy,” she’d said, caressing my cheek. “It’ll keep your mind off the storm.”
    I hold the picture delicately to my chest. What I wouldn’t give to go back there, under the flickering sky with my mother’s hand at my shoulder and the clack clack of Auntie’s rocking chair, the slow steady rhythm that meant all was right with the world. How could I have known then I had everything I ever need? That it would all be taken from me?
    What can I do now to keep my mind off the storm?
    * * *
    The sharp knock on our front door wakes me. I bolt upright and dig in my pants for my knife. Nothing. I scan the room, lit with morning light, for a weapon and spy the fire poker in the stand near the hearth. Hefting the metal rod over my shoulder, I tiptoe to the front door.
    Through the bullet holes in the wood, I see a figure on the other side.
    “Go away!” I yell in my deepest voice. “We don’t want any.”
    “Now, I highly doubt that.”
    Clay. I turn the knob and yank the door open. He stands on the porch in his clean cowboy best—short-sleeve button-down shirt, jeans, boots and his hat. In his left hand he holds a basket of apples, rolls and wrapped bacon. In his right hand is a bar of antiseptic soap. He lifts a dimpled reassuring smile.
    I raise the poker as if to strike.
    “Jesus!” He jumps back. “What’s a fella gotta do to prove he’s worth havin’?”
    As I’m brandishing the poker, Ethan slides up behind me.
    “Are you Clay?” His smile is wide and inviting.
    “He was just leaving,” I say through clenched teeth.
    “Oh.” Ethan’s face falls. He pulls his wounded arm up and clutches it to him. The wound looks awful. The skin around the bite is puffy and oozing. The iodine is long gone.
    I look at Ethan’s arm and then at Clay, who’s eying the poker, waiting for me to strike. I have no choice. The poker thuds heavily against my thigh as I bring it down.
    “Come in,” I say, stiffly. “Can we get you some breakfast?”
    Clay scans my expression and then takes a tentative step forward. “Sure,” he says. “Just put away the brainin’ stick, will ya?”
    I hand him the metal rod. “Take it. I’ll start the stove.”
    Ethan leads Clay to the table and begins peppering him with questions as I try to figure out what the hell I’m doing. Mechanically, I open the stove, toss in the kindling and dig around for a