Free We the Animals by Justin Torres

didn't want to be found.
    Paps assumed it was all Manny's idea because Manny was the oldest and because it was, actually, all Manny's idea. He didn't wait to get home but beat Manny right there in the field, the headlights scaling back the night, casting long wild shadows on the trees, the engine running and the door left wide open, so that the inside of the car was perfectly alit and I could see, from twenty feet away, moths fluttering in and bumping into one another. He beat Manny bad; punched his face, punched his crotch. Manny went crazy, hooting and hollering "Murderer!" over and over.
    "Murderer!" he screamed at our father, but no one was dead. He crawled over to where I stood, grabbed my sleeve, looked into my eyes. "Murderer!" he said.
    "But who's dead?"
    "Me," he said. "Me, I'm dead! And my children."
    Manny was always saying all kinds of crazy shit, most of it to me, because Joel had a way of closing himself off from crazy, but I couldn't figure out how to stop from hearing his words and howls, how to look away.
    So later that night, back at home, just before dawn, Manny climbed into my bed and woke me up, telling me how he had dreamt of kites—a whole sky full of kites, and he was holding all the strings. He told me how the good kites and wicked kites got all mixed up, how he tried to hold on to the good and let the rest float away, but after a while he couldn't tell them apart.
    I didn't say anything. We were on our backs, not touching, but I could tell he was holding himself tight, every little muscle tight. I thought he might cry, or scream. I thought he might climb up on top of me.
    "Paps apologized, you know," Manny said, "for using his fists. He told me he was scared, that something serious could have happened to us."
    He rolled onto his side and watched my face. I pretended to yawn; I didn't like his eyes on me.
    "I used to believe we could escape," he whispered. "I had it all figured out—like when we were in the field today, I was sure that God would grab hold of those kites and lift us up, protect us."
    He took my chin and turned my face toward his.
    "But now I know," he said, "God's scattered all the clean among the dirty. You and me and Joel, we're nothing more than a fistful of seed that God tossed into the mud and horseshit. We're on our own."
    He wrapped one arm and one leg around me and was silent and still for a stretch of time, and I drifted into sleep. After a while Manny started up again, talking to himself, plotting, saying, "What we gotta do is, we gotta figure out a way to reverse gravity, so that we all fall upward, through the clouds and sky, all the way to heaven," and as he said the words, the picture formed in my mind: my brothers and me, flailing our arms, rising, the world telescoping away, falling up past the stars, through space and blackness, floating upward, until we were safe as seed wrapped up in the fist of God.

Wasn't No One to Stop This
    I N THE EVENING, we drew a chalk circle in the street and divided the circle into three sections. We had a blue rubber ball, and we each stood in one of the sections and smacked the ball with our palms, from one to the other, trying to keep the ball alive. With each smack, we imitated our Paps.
    "This is for raising your voice—"
    "And this is for embarrassing me in public—"
    "And this is for doing something—"
    "And this is for doing nothing—"
    "And this—"
    There was the gutter, which caught the ball when we missed, and there were cars that came fast around the bend, then slowed upon seeing us. We stood to the side of the road and looked hard at the drivers through the glass as they passed. If there were kids in the cars, we showed them our tongues or our middle fingers. We had nylon fall jackets, windbreakers with collapsible hoods that rolled up and zipped into the neck like a parachute. We had our blue ball and our anger and the evening sky moving into twilight and the peaks of the roofs against that darkening sky, the antennae,