For All the Space in the World
Katie Jean Shinkle

Our brother wraps an old towel soaked with gasoline around the end of a hunting arrow and lights it on fire, snaps the strings and launches it into the hay bail, watches the eye of the target morph and twist under the weight of the heat, watches everything bend and bend. He wanted to see how far it would launch, if it would go over or under, if it would catch anything on fire at all.
Our brother smells like gasoline all day and into the next. He is breathing gasoline. He is a locomotive. We tell him he is a car. We tell him he eats gas like a robot. He gets angry with us, tells us that we are dead, that we will be dead, that as soon as he gets back from school it's on, he says, you are all dead.
At school we think about how we are dead all day. We wonder what it is like to zombify, to eat the alive. We want to eat every single person we come into contact with. We want to eat their flesh until we can see their bones, we can see the goldfish swimming in their veins. We want to eat the goldfish. We want to marinade all of the blood goldfish and lay them on skewers, lay them on skewers and have our Father grill them outside for dinner, even though it is too wet and gray to grill them outside for dinner, even though we don't own a grill.
When we get home, our brother is hunched over in the garage over the gas can. He has his mouth covered with another rag. He has his face covered with a rag. He has his whole body covered in a rag. He is a rag soaked in gasoline.

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