The Cedarville Review 2018

PROSE 49 Joni shrugged his shoulders against the sheets. He was already thinking about stacks of pancakes and Hungry Jack dripping warm and stringy from out of the slurping syrup bottle. He’d watch cartoons tomorrow morning before going back out to continue the hunt for feath- ers. He knew there was another Red-tail out there somewhere. Uncle Mark liked peregrine falcons the most because they could dive-bomb up to 200 miles-per-hour. He had given Joni a mantle feather from one to add to the wood display he had carved for Joni last Christmas. The feather was sharp and gray like the bits of slate that broke off Mimi and Papa’s patio. But Joni liked the Red-tails best because he could see them from the car, perched on top of a tall tree or a telephone pole, hunting for field mice. I met Joni in the dorm bathroom freshman year. We were both brushing our teeth before bed and made foamy toothpaste faces in the mirror when the paste got too thick in our cheeks to speak. That night, and every so often after that, he told me stories. He told me about his uncle, about the feathers and The Hobbit and his big stone house in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. He told me about the other stories his mother would tell about her two brothers when they were wild like Joni, about their cat Speedy that grandpa used to push into their above ground pool. He told me his own stories too, about the time his brother Freddy dangled from the Brown’s swing set by his belt loop and cried and cried until he couldn’t cry and so he started laughing instead; about when his dad accidentally sent a 5-year-old Piper sledding across their frozen pond; about how one summer he’d hit a wiffle ball into the same pond and watched as Cody Smith flipped backward over the fence and into the water trying to catch it. Where we’re standing now, burrowed in the little pocket-sized valley in the midst of sporadic hills and smooth-rolling pastures, the spot at the top of the drive—where Joni first saw the empty lot that would soon bear the weight of the little Montaigne house—looks so steep it could fold over the rest of the neighborhood to touch the lips of Rattle Snake.