The neighborhood kids get a kick out of it. They’re always trying to stump me, you know, name something I won’t mow over. But I’ll mow over just about anything. Nothing living, of course. Should go without saying. Tyrell Sleeveland — you know him, always with the runny nose, lives off Madison and Twinkle with his step-nana — lifted this orange Nike shoebox lid the other day and showed me a live possum inside. All frozen up and curled out of terror. Asked if I would do it. Jesus kid, I said. Who do you take me for, Leatherface? Get that thing away from me, I told him. And also he loses his vote for the next three weeks.

Other than that though. Very little I haven’t done. MacMillan textbooks. Family photo albums. Lincoln Log sets. G.I. Joe tank. Mason jars. Someone’s dead grandma’s cloche hat. A not-very-ripe pumpkin. A prosthetic leg, if you can believe it. Who knows where they found it. 

Tried a whole cinder block once. You should’ve heard it, sounded like the world was ending. Wrecked the shit out of my blades. Ledger Williams — lives off Daisy and Willowbrook, mom’s dating her second husband again –—volunteered the NASA Challenger model he got from his real dad for Christmas five years ago. Little bitch of a gnawed-up thruster brick bulleted my shin so hard it left a blood blister that didn’t go away for two weeks. Kids thought it was so funny though, me hopping around, clutching my leg. I guess that’s what they’re hoping for, ultimately. Me to get hurt.

Course I make them all stand way back, wear goggles. I’d never forgive myself if one of them got hurt. Me though, I don’t care. If I go out from blood loss after a pink plastic shard from Barbie’s Malibu convertible slices open my jugular, so be it. I’ll have died bringing a little color to cheeks in this town.

When I was a kid here, seemed like joy used to radiate up from the sidewalks. Especially in the summertime. The trees got all jiggly from the heat rising, and you could smell hot dogs charring on the grill and that sticky cherry smell of ice pops left melting on picnic tables. Fireworks crackling in the sky at night like those shivers you get at the base of your spine when a pretty girl talks softly. Every afternoon, we had to turn the scrawnier and more physically inept kids away from the baseball game in the park just so there could be manageable sized teams. We littered the place, us kids. We were like dragonflies, bumping into each other in the tall grass. 

But then with the GE plant closing and it just not making sense to raise families here anymore, you wind up with the morgue we have now. They closed the park, for Christ’s sake. Who closes a park? But they did. Now the grass just keeps getting taller and taller behind that rusty padlocked fence. 

So I’ll be this for the kids if it makes them happy. I’ll let them have this stupid little memory before they get older and have to go off somewhere, shave their mullets, find somewhere actually sensible to live. Before they buy their ranch houses in the suburbs, raise their own attentionally deficit kids. Before gravity curves their spines. I’ll give them this little gift, sure. Let them look back someday and say, remember that dipshit in our old neighborhood? Called himself Shredder? Used to say, I’ll mow over anything. You bring it to me, I’ll mow over it. 

I’ll show you what’s possible in this life, he used to say. Or, at least, a few things that aren’t impossible.

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Andrew Graham Martin‘s writing has appeared in Electric Literature, HAD, Post Road, SmokeLong Quarterly, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. He lives in Indianapolis with his wife and baby daughter. You can find him at andrewgrahammartin.com.