Kenny

Originally published in Broken Pencil, Issue #89, Fall 2020

People yelled at him a lot. He knew that was putting it simply, but sometimes that helped, putting things in the simplest terms possible. People had always yelled at the construction site. Telling him what to do; telling him what he’d done wrong. It was no wonder the accident had happened. They’d yelled at him until all he could hear was yelling, and not the sound he should have heard, the machine coming down. Back when he could work.

It was the same with the girls downstairs. All they did was complain, like it was somehow his fault that his buddy Stevo had left the squirrel on the porch.