Summary

The brothers always wanted more. They were hungry. They craved noise, and turned up the radio and TV loud. They had “bird bones, hollow and light” (2), but they wanted muscles. When it was cold, they slept together for the heat. They fought dirty, throwing plates and glasses. When their father got home he beat them. When he was gone, they pretended to be fathers, hunting for baby birds to keep in shoeboxes. “Always more, always hungrily scratching for more” (2). But on days when their mother struggled for sleep upstairs, and the air was still and light, they would lie on the carpet and want nothing but this.

They sat in the kitchen in raincoats, gleefully smashing tomatoes with a mallet so that the guts exploded onto them and the walls. Ma wandered down and asked why they weren’t at school. It was...