When I was a little girl, my mother and I lived with my grandpa and grandma on a farm in a small town in Giltner, Nebraska, population 213. When he learned of my mom’s pregnancy, my father, Butch Barnason, drove his pick-up straight to Colorado and joined the rodeo, never to be seen again. My mother had one picture of Butch, a square snapshot that curled up at the ends. In it, he’s sitting on my grandparents’ living room sofa, a crucifix behind his head. The photographer captured some of my dad, but most of the picture is taken up by the flat sole of his shoe. What I knew about him could fit into a thimble. He had one blue eye and one green eye, my mother told me. My eyes are brown.

We were an anxious family. The dogs all got hit by cars or shot by the Obermeiers for eating chickens. The cows and pigs were bred for slaughter. Horses were a luxury afforded to only the rich farmers down the road. I longed to own a pony, but settled instead for reading books like Black Beauty and Misty of Chincoteague. The cats lived in the barn rafters, feral, spitting creatures who puffed up in fear if you got too close. One year, a fatal infection took its toll, and they died in batches, strewn across the yellow grass near the haystack. My mom drove me to the Walgreens in Lincoln while my grandpa shoveled up the bodies and burned them in an old oil drum.  

My mother liked to tell the story of the boy in her class who pulled a dresser down on himself and stopped growing. And about her brother Tim’s best friend, Benny Butler, who dove into the chilly water of a pond and never resurfaced. Or the boy who climbed up the ladder of a grain elevator and fell in. His mouth, I imagined, filled with corn kernels when he screamed. The nun who came home for Christmas, took a ride on the back of a John Deere tractor, and snapped her neck when her habit caught in the wheels. The missing girl. The boiled baby. The man down the road.  

More than once, my mother whispered to me the worst nightmare she ever had. “I shouldn't tell you this,” she would say. I would answer, “It's okay.” I was always telling her things were okay. 

In her dream, she comes down to the kitchen and sees her mother by the sink, tears running down her face. She asks her mother what is wrong. Her mother looks up. She’s wearing a bright yellow apron with tiny blue flowers on it. “Oh, honey, we’re so hungry,” she says, turning the handle of the meat grinder. My mother sees that she’s taken a hatchet to the littlest brother, Jeff, and is mincing him into hamburger.  

The chickens my grandpa bought went into a pen near the garage. They were meringue white with brown speckles. My grandma gave me seed to scatter for them. I liked how they pecked in the dirt, with one eye watching. I wanted to touch their feathers, but couldn’t get close enough to them through the wire. In the night, a sound like a woman screaming. At breakfast, only one word between my grandma and grandpa: “Weasels.” 

I was making mud pies out of old beer cans and dirt when my Uncle Tom came home, dragging a ruined motorcycle behind him. He was a big bear of a man who kept his cigarettes in the front pockets of his work shirts, his name stitched in red across the denim. He spent four nights a week slaughtering cows at the meat packing plant in town. When he saw me, he said, “I’m okay, but get Mom.” I called for my grandma. She came out to help Tom inside. As they went up the porch stairs, I saw his shirt was ripped open and the skin had been stripped from his back. They almost made it through the front screen when his knees accordioned and down they went.

Yes, my heart craves these stories. They remind me of home.

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Aimee LaBrie’s short stories have appeared in the Minnesota Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, StoryQuarterly, Cimarron Review, Pleiades, Beloit Fiction Journal, Permafrost Magazine, and others. Her second short story collection, Rage and Other Cages recently won the Leapfrog Press Global Fiction Prize and will be published in 2023. Her novel in progress won the Key West Literary Seminar Emerging Writer Award in 2020. In 2007, her short story collection, Wonderful Girl, was awarded the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and published in a small print run (University of North Texas Press 2007). Her short fiction has been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize. In 2012, she won first place in the Zoetrope: All-Story’s Short Fiction Competition.