Whippoorwill by Joseph Monninger

Author:Joseph Monninger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Before bed I went out to see Wally. Danny had put him on his pole. I figured his father would have some say about whether Wally came inside or not, and it wasn’t a bad night to be outside, anyway. I squatted down and rubbed Wally’s chest. I kept glancing behind me, half hoping Danny might appear, but I couldn’t see his car in the driveway. He was probably out cruising somewhere, maybe over at Holly’s for all I knew, and that line of thinking got me tangled up.

I put my forehead against Wally’s forehead and neither of us moved for twenty seconds or so. The world smelled good. It smelled of rain and mud and trees taking leaf. I thought of what my dad had said at dinner, and about his idea of being a designer, and about the look on Danny’s face when I didn’t invite him inside, and it felt as though I had swallowed a hot coal and instead of going out it burned brighter with each breath. In Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, Brutus’s wife, Portia, dies from eating coals, I knew, because we had read about it in ninth grade literature. When I read it, and when Mrs. Philipone explained it, I didn’t believe a word of it, but now I did. It made all the sense in the world.

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