Free Chicken by Chase Night

leaves. 
    There are gaps, of course, places where the limbs of two trees can’t quite meet, but they keep trying, like star-crossed couples always reaching, they claw at the sunbeams driven between them until sooner or later one can’t take it and throws its body across the rift, lays its head down at its lover’s gnarled feet.
    Harry Boles stands on the rotting trunk of a tree that did just that, dangling his white shirt—the flag that starts the game—against his muddy knee. With his soft and pasty torso sandwiched between cargo shorts and a fedora—“No,” Hannah’s voice in my head reminds me, “That is a trilby”—he looks like a double-stuffed, plaid Oreo. He shouts something I can’t hear at Tyler Mathis, who’s idling Brant’s newer, black four-wheeler about a hundred and fifty yards away. 
    Mathis pulls off his stupid trucker hat, dog-shakes the sweat from his mullet, and then puts the hat on backwards like he’d rather protect his hair than his eyes. He leans off his four-wheeler and something big and white arcs from his lips, splats on the side of the Ditch. The guys perched over his head whoop and holler, and I figure it must’ve been some sort of bet. They’re drawing this out on purpose so I’ll be rattled and more likely to lose in an interesting way, preferably something involving flames.
    Feminine laughter tumbles from above like a rock lobbed right at my head. Lauren. The rest of the church girls are clumped around Colton’s big blue cooler, waiting on us good ol’ boys like well-trained girls from a country song, but Lauren, she’s gone rogue. I can’t really blame her seeing as how whenever she’s around, those other girls suddenly get very loudly concerned with whether or not they look fat. Lauren doesn’t have to ask. She knows, but doesn’t give a crap. Them smaller girls hide behind shapeless, Scripture-printed, XL Tees while Lauren wears shorts that hug her huge butt and tight colorful tops that believe firmly in the separation of her breasts and belly. Hannah calls her the Patron Saint of Haters Gonna Hate.
    I can’t hear what they’re saying, but she keeps buckling and unbuckling her knees like maybe Brant will think she’s falling and try to save her. When that doesn’t get him to touch her, she takes matters into her own hands—matters being Brant’s right arm. She strokes his corded muscles, slipping her fingers under the hem of his sleeve. He smiles—eyes half-lidded, dimples half-flared—and gives in, flexes. Lauren makes a big show of not being able to wrap her whole hand around his bicep, but just when I’m thinking yeah, well, he’d need three hands to wrap around yours, Brant’s eyes slide toward mine and go into an exaggerated roll. 
    A flash of white. A wild shout.
    Mathis’ four-wheeler bellows like an angry, black bull fighting to break loose from the mud.
    “Shit!” Brant wrenches his arm away from Lauren, waving me on. “Go! Go! Go!”
    I kick into gear and jam down the gas lever. My four-wheeler answers Mathis’ challenge like an aging green dragon, wheezing as the wheels spin, slinging hard clods of mud onto my face and arms. I shut my eyes as she lurches out of the muck with a sloppy fart.
    The Ditch fills with the roar of our engines, the sound pressing in even harder than the heat. We should wear ear muffs. We should wear goggles. We should wear jackets. But we don’t. None of the above. Hot wind and lukewarm mud pelt my skin as I surge ahead, blind, leaping over ruts and landing hard on the other side, grinding fallen saplings into splinters. 
    Bite my tongue, taste it bleed, rusty salt water running down my throat. Don’t choke. Open my eyes. Legend has it this is how the Pitcher boys died. Arms, legs, everywhere. Blood, guts, and brains falling like rain. Their mama had to shoot herself to scrub her memory clean.
    Twenty feet in front of me, Mathis bares his teeth like a rabid skunk too crazy to turn away.
    I jerk in my right arm,