In Concrete by Anne Garréta

Author:Anne Garréta
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

12.

We Don’t Give a Clam

WE’LL NEVER KNOW HOW … cause her mouth contorts and she goes quiet. Her eyes widen and stare off into the hedges at the side of the road.

We don’t push it.

We wage war.

Once and for all, we must defeat the yellow felon.

Galloping behind bovines, tipping over the calves asleep in the barn, racing our bikes through farmyards to scramble the poultry, we have no more time for that. No more desire. We ditch the cows. The rodeos, the westerns, that’s all over now.

We devote ourselves to our study of the military arts. Every morning we scrutinize the stray volumes of an old encyclopedia. Poulette, the koala, and I ponder a worm-eaten illustrated volume on the Boer War. We even pore over an old catechism, in case it contains biblical battle plans. Sieges, wars of liberation, pitched battles, colonial campaigns, cavalry charges, or armored divisions maneuvers. All we find we glean and boil down to maxims.

The rest of the time, we see to armament and training. We have hazel sticks aplenty drying in the barn. We gather all the puffball mushrooms we can find, the really ripe ones, and store them in paper bags in the cellar. We steal rakes from all the surrounding farms. We shelter our stash of firecrackers leftover from the fourteenth of July.

And then we fine-tune and test our secret weapon, our ultimate weapon: the dung bomb.

The dung bomb, perfected by me, is a projectile with a wide cone of fire, a suffocating poison gas, and a biological weapon all in one. Clearly by no means a conventional weapon, and the international treaties are silent about it.

Developed, as its name indicates, from semidry cow dung, it’s a formidable weapon, but quite delicate to handle.

We go around noon to collect them on the road where they’ve had time to dry after the cows have deposited them on the way between the pasture and the barn and back. They reek all the more when the bovines have been fed silage. We know the right places, the best barns. Dry and rigid on top—the air-dried side—and wet on the underside.

The tricky part is collecting them without soiling yourself; the key is to stockpile them on crates without letting them dry out too much, and without alarming Grandma, who sees us mucking about with these shit-cakes morning and night and wonders what on earth we could be doing with so much manure.

The dung bomb can be deployed at short and long range, preferably with a badminton racket. Controlling the trajectory is an art unto itself, but Poulette and I never falter, never flag during training. We do it as discreetly as possible, cause we don’t want to perturb our grandparents. We’ve pebble-dashed the back wall of the barn in a rustic, rammed-earth style. Poulette assures me that’s how they do it in some traditional cultures. Seen from afar and from up close, it’s unique, conspicuous. But weirdly, in a thin layer, it stinks less than you might think.

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