The Broken Peace

by Martha Adele

  Derek nudges me as the round starts. “Hey, you may want to pay attention to the birds that are still flying.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” I tell him. “It’s your aim you need to focus on.”

  “Right. Like I haven’t been hitting every bird that comes our way.”

  “There have literally been eleven birds that have come our way. I hit seven of them. You hit three.”

  “No way.” He snorts back at me. “Stop right there. You seem a little mixed up.”

  One horn sounds quickly, and the trophy bird is thrown in our direction. Almost immediately, the pheasant drops down to the ground and flies right into the grass. I watch as the dogs are released and they run through the grass, searching to scare the bird. When it finally jumps up to fly away, it flies in the opposite direction it was thrown.

  No one shoots at first, not wanting the shot to get near the dogs, but after a few moments, all the guns on the opposite side of the field sound off. One shot after another, none take the bird down before it makes it into the tree line.

  Just as we hear the horn sound off three times to signal the next term, I notice something above us circling.

  “A hawk,” the dog keeper of the next stand tells me as we arrive. “It’s circling ’cause of the piles of birds. It attracts them.”

  “I see.” I turn back to the toothless man with his small fluffy dog and nod. “Have you ever had any problem with them? The hawks?”

  “Not yet I haven’t.”

  I nod again and turn back toward the tower as the five blows of the horn echo through the air. Derek and I go through the hunt and hit every bird that comes in our direction. One after the other, I watch as the dogs bring the birds to their keepers to have their necks wrung.

  We are at the last stand in the last term when I hear the dog keeper beside us call out, “George. What are you doing?” He rises to his feet and walks through the little patch of trees beside us and follows the dog. “George! Get back here.”

  Derek and I chuckle as another bird is thrown off the tower.

  “It’s coming our way,” Derek says as he throws the gun up.

  I follow his action and line my sights up, watching the bird soar right toward us, when something steps on my foot. My first guess by its weight is it’s a cat, but the guess is quickly overridden by my thought, It can’t be a cat. A cat would be nowhere near this many gunshots. My curiosity takes over, and I am shocked when I look down to see a terrified, young, and obviously wounded pheasant sitting on my right foot, cornered behind the stand.

  “Derek.” I nudge him as he sets his gun down. “What?” His eyes quickly fall down to my foot and he steps back in shock. “What?” He laughs. “Why, I mean, what happened?”

  I set my gun down and hesitate. I have half of me who wants to pick the bird up, to get it off the ground and make it feel safe, but I also have the other half who doesn’t want to touch it. Before I get a real chance to do anything, the dog keeper comes out of the trees, following his dog, and makes his way back to his seat, seeing the pheasant on my foot on the way. I look around to see “George” running around giddily, looking for the bird, and can’t help but ask, “Is he still in training?”

  The dog’s keeper nods at me, reaches down, grabs the pheasant before I can say anything, and wrings its neck until its body becomes lifeless. “Sorry about that, ma’am.”

  I become speechless as the hunt comes to an end, and we are called in to come back to the bus. Derek squeezes my shoulder and pulls me a bit to try to get my attention away from the bird.

  He came for help.

  He had been raised with humans and came to me for help.

  Only to have me let him be killed.

  He came to me for help.

  When we finally make it back to the lodge, it is late in the afternoon, and the lodge owner offers us all lunch. They serve it cafeteria-style and let everyone pick what they want. Derek and I both choose the foods we are most familiar with and pick a table to sit at by ourselves.

  “You know what’s funny?” Derek asks me, stabbing his meat with a fork and lifting it up to his mouth. “The fact that we just went pheasant hunting, and they are serving us beef.”

  I give him a chuckle and go back to eating. Once we are done eating, Derek and I clear our plates, put them in the sink they provide for us, and head to Mr. Gregory, who is speaking with the lodge owner.

  “Mr. Page!” he calls out to Derek as we make our way over. “How did you two enjoy the hunt?”

  I wouldn’t call it much of a hunt.

  “We enjoyed it a lot, sir,” Derek tells him. “Thank you for inviting us.”

  “It was my pleasure.” He waves us out, and we follow him away from the owner and out the front door. “You two are getting ready to go, I assume.”

  “Yes, sir,” Derek answers him.

  “Well then”—Gregory bends over and opens a cooler that sits up against the side of the entrance. He pulls out two bags of meat and hands them to us—“here you two go.”

  Derek opens his bag. “Is this—”

  “Pheasant, yes. It’s from a previous hunt. We prepare it this way so that everyone leaves with meat at the end of their hunt, whether they shot it or not.”

  I chuckle and look at Derek, but hold back my sarcastic comment.

  Derek somehow telepathically gets my joke and rolls his eyes. “Shut up.” He turns back to Gregory and shakes his hand one last time. “Thank you very much, Mr. Gregory. We enjoyed today, but we do have to get going.”

  “I understand, I understand.” He pulls his hand away and opens the door back up for himself. “I will go call a cab for you two.”

  “Thank you,” Derek tells him.

  Mr. Gregory nods and heads inside. Derek and I take a seat in the decorative swinging bench and enjoy the slight warmth of the late winter months until our cab arrives.

  Sam

  Why does sheep poop look like this?

  The first day I had to clean a stall and saw this poop, my first thought was, “What are these black beans doing in here?”

  My question was shortly answered when I scared the sheep out of the stall and the poop fell from them as they ran.

  If only I could get them to leave the stall now. For some reason, a few of the sheep will run from me, but others just assume I have food and scream at me until I scream back. At one point, Big Mamma, one of the oldest sheep of Mr. Gohaki’s farm, and I had a screaming contest. She screamed at me for food over and over, and that day I couldn’t take it anymore so I turned back to her and shouted in her face, “Bah!”

  She quickly returned my shout with a loud and booming “Blah!” Her tongue extended out toward me as if it made her shout more powerful, so I did the same.

  We went back and forth. That was the day a few of the sheep realized they shouldn’t be scared of me. Now, I have to continuously run them out of the stall so I can clean it.

  My scooping of the thick manure is interrupted as a bucket in the barn’s hallway topples over, scaring me in the process. I look to my right through the hole in the horse stall where the horses’ heads stick through to see Bram’s head pop up. “Sammy boy!”

  My shoulders relax and I roll my eyes. “Did you just trip over a bucket?”

  “Nah, man.” Bram throws his arms over the hole and leans against the wall. “Hey, you didn’t tell me there was a bombshell working here.”

  “What?” I walk over to him and lean the shovel up against the wall. “What are you talking about?”

  “You know what I mean. That girl?”

  I look around the stall and out to Big Mamma. I can tell she is about to jump back into the stall, so I run over to her and spook her and her followers. The sound of all of their hoofs stomping and stampeding away is almost louder than Bram was with the bucket.

  “Dude,” Bram snorts,
“what are you doing?”

  I rise back to my standing position and realize how stupid I probably look. “Nothing,” I tell him. “So what brings you by?”

  “I was in the neighborhood. I have a meeting to get to in a bit and wanted to drop by.”

  “How’d you find me?”

  He snorts again. “That girl that I was telling you about.”

  “I still don’t know what you are talking about.”

  Bram rolls his eyes. “Whatever, dude.” He clears his throat and smiles at me cockily. “I’m actually here with a proposition.”

  “Yeah?” I look back over to the sheep out in the paddock to make sure they aren’t inching their way over.

  “Yeah. I actually was going to offer you a job. You know, if you’re up for it.”

  My head jerks back toward him. In surprise, I ask, “A job? What is it?”

  I need a job.

  “A”—his head sways as he looks around—“salesman of sorts.”

  “Of sorts?”

  “It’s more a deliveryman. I make all the deals, and you meet the people.”

  A smile finds its way onto my face. “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. The only real catch is that it, well, isn’t something that needs to be made public.”

  “What?”

  Bram looks around the barn and turns back to me. “Nobody is here, are they?”

  I shake my head.

  “Good. I trust you, Sammy. You and I have similar issues. We are both on the vial system, right?”

  I nod.

  “Right. So if I tell you my job, you won’t tell anyone, right?”

  “Well, it doesn’t hurt anyone, right?”

  “No way! In fact, it is the opposite.”

  I inhale and take in a floating piece of hay. I blow my nose out in disgusted and violent puffs and turn back to him. “What is it?”

  “And you won’t tell anybody?”

  “No.” I jolt back to the sheep as Elsa hops into the stall. I chase her out and turn back to Bram.

  “I sell vials.”

  “Sell them? To who?”

  “You know, to people who aren’t prescribed the same dosage as we are or to people who can’t get their hands on it at all.”

  I grab the shovel and continue to scoop the poop. “Isn’t that illegal? Didn’t we sign something when we got the vials, saying we wouldn’t share them or give them out?”

  “Well, think of it this way.” Bram enters the stall and looks around. “You aren’t sharing your vials, nor would you be giving them out. You are distributing vials that I have given you so you wouldn’t be doing anything illegal.”

  I take in a deep breath and quickly realize it was a mistake. The poop smell gets three times worse when I hit a pocket of wet poop beneath the hardened surface.

  Bram winces and exits the stall. Holding his shirt over his nose, he hands me a messenger. “Here,” he says to me through the fabric, “it’s good pay. Just consider it. Message my contact when you have an answer.” The little clear plastic screen folds open and closed. When I open it, a small glowing keyboard pops up, along with a place to insert the number to message.

  I need the money.

  Mom needs the money.

  “I will think about it,” I tell him, sliding the messenger into my pocket.

  “Message me if you decide you want to do it. I have to go. I will see you later.” Still holding his shirt over his nose, Bram takes off out of the barn.

  I pull the messenger out of my pocket and stare at its screen. I scroll through it and find only one contact listed: “Bram.”

  I need the money. If I don’t pay the bills soon, they will double in size. I can’t let that happen, and I can’t let Mom find out.

  I have to take this job.

  It’s not like Bram has a problem keeping his job a secret. I’m sure I could do the same.

  After hours of working in the barn, I finally finish the stall and head home, covered in hay, wool, and bits of manure that had been floating through the barn. “Mom, I’m—”

  I turn to the dining room table when I enter the house and find Mom looking at me with a smile, an older woman sitting beside her, and the girl from Bergland that I couldn’t take my eyes off of. Her dark and silky hair looks even better in this light, and her eyes are so much more stunning up close.

  “… home?” I finish.

  “Sam!” Mom rises to her feet and gestures to the two guests. “I’m so happy you’re home! This is Carrol and her daughter Aspen.”

  Carrol rises to her feet and takes my hand. “Hi, Sam! Your mother has told me so much about you.”

  I give a nervous chuckle as I look at the three women, trying not to blush when I look at Aspen. “I hope they were all good things.”

  “Oh, they were,” Aspen confirms with a smile. “All good things.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Logan

  The air in the room that the physical therapists takes Eric and I to is much colder than I expect. I assume it is kept in this temperature because the patients will be working up a sweat. That is definitely Eric’s case.

  I watch as they slide his new leg on and realize it is much more of a robot leg than it is anything else.

  “So as you know,” the therapist tells Eric, “above-the-knee amputees have it worse than below-the-knee amputees, but this specific piece of prosthesis was made specifically for you and your needs. Okay?”

  Eric nods, giving her a little smile.

  “What I mean by that is we took your measurements so that this would fit perfectly and be able to hold you up just as your real leg did, but that isn’t all this will do.” She finishes strapping it onto his leg and rises to her feet. “This attaches itself to your nerves through the skin and reads your brain signals, just as your leg did before. Go ahead, lift up your leg.”

  Still sitting, Eric holds on to the arms of his chair and looks at his new limb. I stand across from him, watching, waiting, and hoping he will do it.

  Slowly, but surely, he moves the foot. He lifts his foot up and down and looks at me with wide eyes. After he moves his foot, he slowly lifts the bottom portion of his leg to a completely lifted position.

  “This is weird,” he tells the therapist. “I’m not using any muscle, but it feels like I am, but at the same time, it feels like I’m not.”

  She chuckles. “I know. It will take some getting used to. Do you want to go ahead and try to stand?”

  Eric nods and forces himself off the chair using the arms. He gets to a standing position, but it is obvious he hasn’t put any weight on the new leg yet.

  “It’s okay,” the therapist reassures him. “Go ahead.”

  He leans a little bit onto the new leg and doesn’t fall. Looking down at the two different feet, he regains his normal standing position. “This is so weird.”

  “Yeah, I know,” she reassures. “It will get better, but for now, isn’t this great?”

  He shrugs. “Can I walk?”

  “Do you want to find out?” She looks over to two rails standing side by side that they use for people who are learning to walk again.

  Eric nods, and the therapist goes to his side. She wraps her arm around him as he does to her, and they slowly make their way over to the rails. Though Eric is in pain, I can tell he somewhat enjoys her attention.

  Once Eric gets between the poles, he grabs on to them and stands for a moment. He stares at the chair on the other end of his new obstacle course and takes a deep breath. One step with his new leg, and one half step with his real leg. His new leg gives out, and he falls onto the rails, shaking, holding on as if his life depends on it.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay.” The therapist makes her way to his side and places her hand on his back. “That’s expected until you get used to it.”

  E
ric, with his eyes squeezed closed and his whole upper body wrapped around the rails, nods. “I know.” He forces his way back to his feet and takes a few more deep breaths. With his eyes still closed, he croaks out, “Logan, can you please leave?”

  “What?” I ask him.

  “Please?”

  The therapist looks at me and nods. After a moment of taking one final look at Eric, I leave the room and head into the waiting room next door, where the atmosphere is completely different. In the room where Eric is working, it is slightly dim, and all the walls are painted a deep blue. It has a cold and darker feel to me, but this room? The lights are bright, the air-conditioning is even stronger than before, and the light-colored walls seem to reflect the light into my eyes.

  I take a seat in one of the red foam-covered chairs and watch Eric through the door’s window.

  “Was it too hard to watch?” the woman behind the desk asks me.

  “What?”

  “Your friend. The one who is trying to walk. Was it too hard to watch?”

  I shake my head and continue watching him through the window. “No. He just didn’t want me in there with him.”

  “I can understand that,” she tells me. “Don’t take it too hard though. Everybody reacts differently.”