Bright Shards of Someplace Else by Monica McFawn

with a high, shattering crackle, like a prehistoric mastodon waking from a fossilized slumber, shaking its tusks free first. The response of the machine frightened him; he had no idea how to control or direct what was happening, but he was beyond turning back. The backhoe began to rumble and swerve forward, the wheels jerking right and left, Bill hunched over the controls as if he’d just taken a sudden blow to the gut. The tires spun and threw up snow and ice; out of the corner of his eye he saw Fran approaching with her hand in front of her face, trying to block the spray. He gave it more gas, tried to move the bucket down toward the horse, but it raised to its fullest height, like a hand lifted in heavenly praise or wound up to strike. He heard Fran’s shouts, saw her leaping at the cab like some desperate mutt, and the bucket came partly down but he could see it would not reach the horse, not yet. He accelerated yet again, and this time the machine found purchase and lurched forward and before he could react it was over the edge.
    The front tires hung over and spun. The bucket rested on the horse, which had rotated under the pressure so now its back legs hung down straight like a cat twisting in midair to land on its feet. He threw the machine in reverse, and every time he laid off the gas even for a moment, the backhoe rocked forward and threatened to tip. The back wheels dug deeper into the icy sub-layer of the winter pasture and beganto lose ground. He rose up off the seat, turned backward as if the machine might follow, and stood on the accelerator with both feet. He could see his mother’s house and stable in the distance, could see the clear empty sky and the slight winter breeze shaking up a few frozen branches so they rattled like wet bone. Nothing he saw admitted of the chaos of which he was part. Even the rev of the engine and tires was a thick insulating lull, nothing sharp or panicked, except for a higher whine, a building screech. He spun back around—was the engine burning up? Then he saw Fran standing immediately below him, her head wrap popped off her wide-strung ears. She was yelling at him. He saw her mouth move. At first he did not hear her, but the repeated rhythm of her cry finally got through:
Turn it off, turn it off!
He couldn’t run the thing hard in reverse forever, so he turned it off and readied himself to leap off as it fell. But the backhoe simply swayed a bit as it quieted, and the rush of adrenalin abandoned him so he sat, stunned and stupid, while Fran called his name.
    He finally climbed off the machine. Fran was quiet as she watched him descend. Her brown-gray hair was dotted with dry felled snow, as if her head was sprouting small white blooms down the length of dropping stems. Her mouth, so thin-lipped that it seemed a fissure in her face, blossomed outward, quivering and wet. She put a fist, clad in a thick winter glove, up to her mouth and sank to the ground, her back against the machine, the snow piling on her bare, bent neck. Her sobs were so quiet they could have been the tiny pings of snowy sleet on the backhoe, could have been a laugh three properties away carried in and altered by the winter wind.
    His mother’s house and stables, the fence line, Fran, the driveway—these images seemed to bulge with an aggressive particularity, it was as if the dead horse was an accent mark, changing the emphasis and making everything foreign. He looked up at the falling snow, so hushed and composed, and felt a sudden vertigo, as if the snowflakes were actually still and he was slowly levitating upward, giving the illusion of their fall. He sat down. A red drop from his reactivatedbloody nose hit the snow like a burst of fireworks on a horizontal sky. After a moment, he pulled himself along the icy ground so that he was sitting next to Fran. Her profile was slack, her face collapsing into her chin, which receded into her neck, as if her whole head had originally been