Sprout

of shape. I’m pretty sure if you go to your mom’s cookbook or epicurious.com and look up “Disaster, Recipes for,” you’ll find that set of ingredients pretty close to the top of the list.
    There was a fence on the far side of the road, an open pasture a few hundreds yards wide beyond it, then the huddled, half-leaved trees that marked the edge of the riverbed. It seemed so close that when I reached for the fence’s single strand I felt like I was going to lift up the river itself and pull it the last few inches towards me.
    “After you-ooo-ooo-ooo-ow www www wwwwwuhhhh hhhhhhhhgyawd DAMN !”
    Ty’s fit made his response to “Car! Car!” seem like a quiet titter at a fancy restaurant. He laughed so hard I thought he was going to crack a rib or crap his pants. When he was finally able to speak, he picked himself up off the ground and reached a hand down to help me stand, which is the first time I realized I’d fallen on my butt. I’d dropped the bag of cell phones and they lay scattered about me like the last of my commonsense.
    “Nice fro dude!” he sputtered, and haloed his head with his hands.
    I touched my hair tenderly. It crackled alarmingly, as though electricity still coursed through it.
    “Jesus,” I said. “Aren’t they supposed to put a sign up? Or something?”
    Ty, busily scooping up phones, nodded towards a metal placard flapping about six feet down the fence.
    WARNING!
1,000 VOLTS
    “Like that one?”
    “Ty! You could’ve warned me! I might’ve been killed!”
    “Relax, missy, it’s only a thousand volts close to the circuit box. This far out, it’s probly not even five hundred.” He tossed the last phone in the bag, where it landed with a loud cracking sound.
    “Hey, be careful. You’re gonna break that.”
    “Um, news flash, Bradford. We’re gonna shoot them?”
    “Oh right.” I grinned sheepishly. “I’m not as think you drunk I am,” I said, and reached to lift up the fence.
    “Daniel!” Ty’s voice was half concerned, half amused. He pointed to the sign again. “Electric?”
    I shmunkurped, which is a shrug/smirk/Man-am-I-drunk combo, capped by a good long burp. Ty pushed down the top strand of the fence with the sole of his shoe, and I stepped over it very, very, very carefully. I only fell once.
    As we began our final march to the river, he said quietly, “Keep your eyes peeled.”
    I looked around for a farmer or a cop or the congregation of the Westboro Baptist Church. “Huh? Why?”
    “Electric fences are expensive. Wouldn’t put one up unless there was something to keep in.”
    “Like?”
    “Dunno. Bulls probly.”
    “A pasture full of bulls?”
    “Getting ready to be steered.” His fingers illustrated: snip-snip.
    I glanced around. It was a big pasture, and I couldn’t see where the fence stopped. The river was still a ways away, and I picked up my pace.
    “Maybe we should run.”
    Ty shook his head. “The vibration of our footsteps. It’d bring ’em to us faster than a heifer swishing her tail to spread her pheromones around.”
    He slowed still further, and I slowed with him.
    “You know the word ‘pheromones’?”
    “ Sshh. ”
    He slowed even more, placing his foot gingerly on the ground as though it were the thinnest crust over a pit of molten lava. I slowed as well, which was strangely more difficult than walking fast. At one point I was halfway through a step and forgot that my front foot was still in the air when I tried to lift my back one to follow. Oddly enough, I could not do this.
    “ Sshh! ” Ty hissed when I tumbled to the ground.
    Slower, slower, slower. Eventually we were taking slomo Saturday morning–cartoon steps, one foot hovering off the ground for five, ten, twenty seconds before landing on the ground, and my rum-addled brain finally figured out he was jerking my chain.
    “You buttwipe!”
    I lunged for him, but he dodged, and then we ran all the way to the river (adrenaline seemed to counteract the effects of the alcolol—I mean alcohol—and I was able to do this without falling). The dry grass of the pasture gave way to low brush—itch ivy of course, and ragweed and nettles and, you know, plants—and then we were in the trees. We beat our way through a good fifty feet of fairly dense undergrowth, then suddenly burst through the other side. The river was narrower here, faster, deeper. A single stream ran through the line of trees with only half a dozen feet of muddy bank on either side. Ty stopped