My Dad said growing up with you was like watching the evolution of a mechanical engineer. At four years old, you preferred taking toys apart and reassembling them. At seven, it was buildings constructed from Amazon boxes and LEGOs. After that, puzzles, robotics clubs, and shop classes. He told me that by twenty-two you could build anything—except trust, and blamed your years of collisions with linebackers.
My first taste of alcohol came from your beer dregs, its aroma a mix of hops, yeast, and Camel cigarettes. Before my tenth birthday, you gave me a BB gun and said keep it a secret. After I shot out a neighbor’s window, it wasn’t.
Whenever you tossed a butt, I’d pick it up and pretend. The day you showed me how to inhale, my lungs caught fire, and I couldn’t stop coughing. When I got back from the emergency room, you said it was a lesson.
My dad and mom tolerated it all until the frigid November afternoon we built a trailer for your truck. They were at work as I handed you tools and tossed scraps of wood into the burn barrel to keep us warm. With the fire dying, we needed fuel, and I suggested the basement, cluttered for years. We found some old wooden toys, but not enough. However, buried under layers of musty clothes and Life Magazines sat my mom’s piano, a hard-maple upright with solid wooden legs. I said she hadn’t played it in years, and you pushed the piano to the center of the room, tipped it back so the legs were horizontal, and sent me to fetch a saw. Soon, one leg fell to the floor, and another was cut halfway. We dropped the amputated leg into the barrel, stoked the embers, and waited for it to ignite.
Returning to the basement, we found Mom standing near the piano. The saw rested at an angle within the half-cut leg, and it didn’t budge as she tried to dislodge it. Then she touched the stump’s raw surface, pale as her face, and asked where the other leg was.
Barry Yedvobnick’s fiction is forthcoming at Literally Stories and appeared recently in Bright Flash Literary Review, The Phare, Sky Island Journal, Neither Fish Nor Foul, 10 by 10 Flash Fiction, CommuterLit, and Wordrunner eChapbooks. His nonfiction writing received a 2025 Georgia Press Association Award. A retired biologist, he narrates stories for AntipodeanSF radio shows. www.chillsubs.com/profile/barryyedvobnick