by Connor Harding
My brother used to pack things into his snowballs when we fought in the yard. Pine stems, mulch, washers, mud, spit and chicken bones—there were no rules in war back then, only losers and the slush on their necks. But he was competitive—always wound thin like twine. One winter he caught my lip with a piss missile packing smooth rocks from the creek, and I could taste nothing but oxidized iron in my mouth. For a long time, I imagined the cold of the snow as hatred, shaved to powder and re-given form.
Then, one morning, I found something fatty and red in the splatter. A piece of his liver, quarter-sized and tucked into the ice. Next came the tip of a rib, a bundle of veins. I looked up and saw my brother, the gaps in him letting through streaks of raw grey light. He burrowed heart and shin, tooth and ear into the snow. He threw those parts of himself day after day, week after week, lading in smatters across the yard until there was nothing left of him but his scarf.
I never once thought to ask him to stop.
Connor Harding is a fiction writer and MFA candidate at George Mason University. His works have been published in Every Day Fiction, Rogue Phoenix Press, and is forthcoming in HAD and Crow & Cross Keys. He is originally from Youngstown Ohio, and writes stories set in the Midwest.
Kingcup is a friend of the magazine.
Unstamatic 