How to Throw the Thing

How to Throw the Thing

By Brendan J. O’Brien

                                                            Stalingrad, 1942
 
Psst, hey soldier, over there – a gaggle of krauts taking a piss.
 
Remember your training.
 
Loosen up the wing with a few arm propellers.
 
Feel the ligaments pull from the bone as the muscles prepare to fire.
 
Pick the thing up and gauge its weight with your fingers, roll it around your palm.
 
Bring it to your ear and pray to its power.
 
Wind up, rear back, release, follow through.
 
Lean into the strange slow motion-ness of what’s about to happen:
 
the violent seizure of an April afternoon, the evaporation of sound
as time turns blue from choking on its own absurdity.
 
Watch the grenade explode; relish the searing flash of hot white light.
 
Witness enemy flesh sliding off enemy bone, a one-sided math like butter in a pan.
 
Cover your head from the hailstorm of limbs.
 
Hot damn. Destruction. You did that.
 
Now stand. Straighten.
 
Are you alright, soldier?
 
Soldier?
 
Okay take five. Take a breather. Go sit on that rubble that once was a home.
 
Close your eyes, maybe. Take this canteen. Remember little league on hot summer nights.
Remember the symphonic perfection of the crickets and the ice cream truck,
the man in white selling bomb pops by the dozen,
the sticky blue juice dripping down your forearms.
Remember how the stickiness helped you grip the ball.
Rub your thumb over the raised red seams.
Feel the weight of the thing in your hand.
You are a peasant about to become a king.

Brendan J. O’Brien is a writer from Wisconsin. His fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in numerous places including W.W. Norton’s Hint Fiction: An Anthology, HAD, Akashic Books, Gloom Cupboard, Molotov Cocktail, Hobart, and Notre Dame Magazine. His little league Easton was silver and green. Follow him on Twitter at @mudvilleprose.

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