The Wilding by Benjamin Percy

remembers in the weeks after his discharge, sitting in a Shari’s restaurant, sipping coffee and forking into a piece of strawberry pie, when a mother and her child—a round-faced toddler with a black shock of hair—sat down at a nearby booth. When the toddler broke a green crayon and began crying inconsolably, a high-pitched wailing that made him think of an air-raid siren, he imagined smashing the kid’s skull against the edge of the table until it cleaved in two and spilled forth a red mess not so different from that of his pie. He wasn’t sure what he felt in that moment, a half-chewed bite of strawberry softening on his tongue. Anger? No. Anger was a word with too much octane in it. He felt an impulse to strike out. That was a better way of thinking about his mind and its rewiring, as something that responded to impulses. He knew he was not normal. He knew people would hate him if they were privy to his thoughts. He knew he ought to feel guilty, regretful, about the child, about the thousands of tiny nightmares that went through his head every day. But he does not.
    He remembers when things didn’t feel so dark, when life seemed bright with beauty, with possibility. He remembers sitting in his desert cammies on a Curtiss Commando transport plane—on his way out of Romania after a refuel, on his way to Mosul—when he peered from the window and beyond the green rolling hills and sparkling lakes and saw the Carpathians mantled with snow and felt completely alive and connected to the two hundred men around him who would face horror and frustration and who would die for one another.
    That feeling is unavailable to him now. He does not see himself as part of anything, only apart. His company is best suited for the woods.
    Sometimes he drives out into the desert and parks in the shadow of a juniper or a monolith of rock whose shape suggests a fossilized animal. When he sits in his truck with the country sprawling all around him, when he hears the wind moaning through the canyons and whispering through the sagebrush, when he observes the sun ride up in the sky and burn the color out of stones and the moisture out of soil, when a cluster of ants carries a grasshopper carcass into their swarming nest, when a hawk drops out of the empty blue and strikes a rattlesnake and carries it off to a fencepost to peel apart, Brian understands he is a part of the scenery—simply an animal, a complicated animal—and as an animal he can be either prey or predator, a target or the arrow that hastens toward it.
    Now, at the gas station, when he opens his eyes again, he finds the bleak weather departed, the clouds blown off into the desert. The rain has clarified the air, revealing the mountains, dusted with fresh snow that gleams in the sunlight. He can appreciate their beauty only distantly, distracted as he is by the faint throbbing in his temple. At moments like these, he cannot help but feel someone has bored into his skull to burrow around, picking at his mind like a careless locksmith.

JUSTIN
    Justin has not spoken to his father for three months. Not since he returned home from the hospital and began weight lifting in the living room, shirtless, his chest cloven by a zipper-shaped scar. “Got to get back into it,” he said. When Justin scolded him for this, his father told him to fuck off, mind his business.
    Paul has always been like bad weather—relentless, expansive, irritating—but since the heart attack he has grown even wilder and more unreasonable, as if, having cheated death, the laws of life no longer apply to him.
    The long silence is not unusual. Over the years, their conversations often begin on a normal note—how’s work, how’s the fishing. Then their voices rise in argument, though usually they can’t remember what about after a few weeks pass. Such is the natural rhythm between them—every season for them like the emotional course of a year for most fathers and sons, where the small pangs of affection felt