Nudging you down the cellar stairs as a prank. Small of the back. You weighed maybe eighty-five pounds. Barely five feet tall. Cracking your head on the concrete floor. Snapping your neck in an instant the way (on TV) a hyena snaps the neck of its prey. Or, he’d have cornered you in the garage one afternoon when you returned home from school and no one else was in the house. He’d have put on Daddy’s old cracked leather gloves abandoned on a work bench in the garage. Slipping on the gloves that fitted his hands loosely but comfortably. Staring at you with interest as if tearing wings off a butterfly as he punched, punched, punched your face you had not have guessed was so tender, the first blow would draw blood.

And your head, as you fell. The bone of the skull not so hard and so protective as you’d have wished to believe. Slid down the wall. Cobwebs in the concrete wall, and cobwebs in your hair. Eye sockets broken, hematomas in both your eyes. Lower jaw broken, slack. Broken teeth. Cartilage of your nose smashed. Rapid punch, punch. Rapid punch. Left jab, right cross.

Keep your fucking mouth shut, now you won’t be able to open it.

Manslaughter was the most they could charge. Not homicide. Chain of circumstances, accidents. None of it premeditated. Christ! Kids so young, they fuck up every day and could not have premeditated anything. Like trying to premeditate a shit. You could not.

Anyway, they could not. Had not. Just came up behind the kid on the bicycle by chance and never saw his face. They would swear.

SHOULD’VE SHOVED HER HARDER DOWN THE STEPS. SHOULD’VE broke her God-damn head. Fucking mistake, to show mercy.

You’d imagined that Lionel no longer glanced in your direction. Was no longer aware of you. Distracted, brooding. Gnawing his lower lip, grimacing. Waiting for the phone to ring. He’d never been a boy to think much but now he’d become a creature eaten up by thinking, plotting. Like something was inside him, a living thing. And his eyes ringed with fatigue. You’d noticed him frowning in your direction but not at you. Peering behind you and not at your face. Over your shoulder.

Looking to see if anyone was around. Watching, listening. If Mom was in the next room. If any of them would come to help you.

When it happened it wasn’t the cellar steps, and it wasn’t in the garage. No leather gloves. And no warning.

You’d gone outside to check bird feeders depleted of seed, abandoned and frozen at the rear of the house and recalled suddenly when it was (probably) too late, the birds had flown elsewhere. Foolishly you’d ventured outside at the rear of the house where the concrete steps hadn’t yet been salted, shoveled of snow.