The Cedarville Review 2018

PROSE 45 Stephen would jump out and shoot them with Joni’s slingshot. But that was ages ago, months even. Now the walls smell fresh with paint and the plywood floors, still waiting to be carpeted, are coarse beneath Joni’s soft, white toes. “Joni? Did you get your tie on?” His mother shouts as she leans over the stove. Joni looks in the bathroom mirror, snaps his suspenders once, and tumbles down the freshly stained stairwell. His mother, standing over the kitchen sink with a crockpot and a chicken, glances around to look at him proudly displaying the paisley Ralph Lauren clip-on, a miniature of the one his father got on sale at Macy’s and wears on Easter. Their house was new, but their church was the same old church—filled up with the same families, the same green polyester chairs, the same ivy bordered baptismal, the same friends. “We just live a little further away now is all,” Dad said, “Out of town and into cow country.” This meant more reading Henry and Ribsy, hitting baseballs in the driveway, reenacting medieval battles with plastic swords and rubber arrows, and much more feather collecting. Out in the woods, even in the backyard, Joni could hunt down the feathers of blue jays, robins, goldfinches, bluebirds, pileated woodpeckers, barn owls, and orioles. Once he even found the brown and white-striped primary feather of a red-tail hawk. His mother had a little clock in the dining room with each of these on display. Uncle Mark had mailed him Eyewitness Book’s Bird for his birthday, a perfect introduction on how to shape his new life with the pastures and woods that had been waiting millions of years just for a bony, brown-haired boy named Joni to discover and investigate them. From what Joni remembered of his mother’s brother, his uncle had been a Tolkien fanatic; a father who would threaten a spanking in front of grandpa but could only bear to pat little Anna gently on the bottom before kissing her forehead and apologizing for being harsh;