Day 4 Winner of Quarto’s 2022 Thunderdome Flash Fiction Contest. View the prompt here.

He is quiet as he sifts through the rubble. One hand pushes the debris from side to side, avoiding little bits of broken glass and china. Pieces of a home that is no longer in one piece. His other hand runs through his jagged hairline—gray, receding, and sheen with a thin line of sweat and soot.

I stand at the edge of the wreckage, where the chunks of foundation turn into dust. He tells me to pretend the bone crunches are just big pretzels snapping beneath your feet, but I have a terrible imagination, and he knows this. So he doesn’t say anything when I stop where the wreckage begins.

I tell him to be careful, but he just grunts. He likes to remind me—he does not know caution, but he does know war.

He and I see it at the same time. He pauses. I fiddle with my belt loop. I think he is praying that whatever the protruding purple thing is does not come attached to a human. He does not know God, but he sometimes likes to pray to him.

He treads slowly over to the purple object and pulls it from the ground. Debris slides off of it in a shower of little rocks. The object is faded, but still a deep purple. A stuffed toy. Unevenly stuffed and sown, but still a stuffed toy. I watch him examine it, turn it over in his hands.

What is it, I ask, but he knows he does not owe me any answers. With crunching steps, he makes his way towards me, gripping it by the snout. It’s an anteater, I state as he approaches.

It’s not an anteater, it’s a fucking tapir, he says gruffly as he passes me. And its snout is too long.