He remembers how hot the desert can be once he is out in it, not a second before as he jumps off the edge of the flatbed and the truck speeds away, taking any hope of shade with it. Now he knows why his mother always stuck a hat on his head when he went out. But Izzy is a rebellious eleven-year old and the sun has to go down eventually- all he has to do is wait it out and he’ll be fine. He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand, sweating already beneath the heat and the weight of his most precious possessions strapped to his back. His lemon yellow hair sticks to his skin as he shuffles into the dust. A wind kicks up from the west, clearing the air to reveal his new home.

The desert is flat and dingy and endless, it seems, as he squares himself against it, the only road into town at his back. He needs to find a landmark, he advises himself, something he can make camp next to. He needs to find food, too, if he’s going to make it on his own. As he tries to decide which to do first, he takes a swig from his cheap canteen, plastic meant to look like the stretched stomach skin of some exotic animal. The water hits his tongue and Izzy grimaces. Sink water. Metal-tasting. But happily, he realizes that this is the last time he’ll have to drink water from the sink. From now on, he’ll drink out of ponds or the hollowed-out hearts of cacti, like he saw them do in that one movie he liked. Only they had a dog.

Pressing further into the desert, he adds a dog and a hat to the list of things he needs. A dog would be the best thing for right now, because the desert is already getting a little boring, but Izzy imagines one won’t be handy for at least a while. Instead, he decides to find food. That’s the second most exciting job.

Izzy reaches over his shoulder, hands and arms tangling in his bags’ straps and finally he takes them all off with a grunt. Going down on his knees, he sifts through the packs, shoving loose objects back into any vacancy they‘ve left behind. Some chewing gum, a pair of cleats, a notebook all get smashed into a wad as he crams them into a willing container. Finally, sifting through a long duffel bag he used to keep his baseball gear in, he grabs the strap he needs and slings it over his shoulder.

The hunting rifle rolls painfully between his shoulder blades as he takes off for a distant patch of brush, leaving his supplies behind. He’ll be able to spot them, he thinks, because they’re the only not-yellow, not-dead thing for miles and miles. His mother would yell at him for letting everything get so dusty, Izzy thinks with a grin, the skin of his lips already splitting in the dry air. He’ll let everything get cracked and dusty from now on- that‘ll be his code. Nearing the brush, his feet stamping craters into the fractured earth, Izzy stops when movement blurs in the corner of one eye. The lazy twitch of a jackrabbit’s ear draws him away from any thoughts of his mother or his stuff. His instincts are honed, basic, like a trained killing machine’s. The jackrabbit is tan and fat, almost the size of a dog. A small dog, anyway, but it doesn’t matter. He could eat it for weeks and weeks. He’ll have his own Thanksgiving everyday.

He takes the rifle from his shoulder and awkwardly loads it, cocks it, then points. His dad taught him when he was still a kid, only eight, but he’s never gotten a chance to shoot until now. In all that time, he‘s never seen his father shoot it, either. He probably won’t even notice it's gone. As he closes one eye, squinting down the length of the barrel, he waits for the jackrabbit to move. It isn’t fair to shoot it when it's only sitting there, minding its own business. A few minutes go by, Izzy sweating and aching to change position, the jackrabbit scratching itself.

“Kyaaah!” Izzy screams, still on the ready. He hopes to scare it into action, but the darn thing just flicks its foot again. “Kyaaaaaaah!”

The jackrabbit looks up. Their eyes meet from thirty-five feet or so. It isn’t afraid of him- he can tell by the way it blinks all the time. Animals, when they're scared, never blink. It is daring him to kill it, Izzy knows. It thinks this is funny, laughing on the inside just like his sister when she got her boyfriend to drop Izzy out in the middle of the desert so he could live on his own like he had always talked about. Everybody thinks this is a big joke. He pulls the trigger and misses, a dust rocket blasting off a good distance to the left of the jackrabbit. Falling back with the recoil, his shoulder throbbing, Izzy kicks at the ground in frustration. He rocks back to his feet to check if the rabbit is still there. It is. But now it’s scared. Now it won’t move, won’t even blink at Izzy. His tongue darts out the side of his mouth as he concentrates, willing himself to make his mark. He even asks God to help him. God isn’t allowed to think he is a joke, too.

This time, when the shot rings out and he braces himself for the kick, no dirt comes up from the ground. The rabbit falls back with a soft thud. He feels a little cheated when he sees it hit the ground- it didn’t die properly, dramatically, as he expected it should. After dropping the rifle, he shuffles over to the jackrabbit’s side.

It is different than those dead animals he’d seen in fancy restaurants and hunting lodges. They had looked natural, almost happy, doing their dead animal things. The fish tails were all mid-flip, the birds were strung from the ceiling flying slowly across the dining room, glass eyes shining for a nice murky pond somewhere. All Izzy’s rabbit does is lie there. When he looks closely, he notices the light changing in its eyes and the tiny, fearful breaths it is taking. He crouches down and sets a hand on its bowed chest, pressing his palm into its matted fur. With a terrible tingle running from his hand up his arm and into the whole of him, he feels its heart palpitate beneath the skin like a tiny motor grinding to start. Like when momma couldn’t get the car running on cold mornings, the heart finally gives up and the light sneaks out of the jackrabbit's eyes for good. Still, there‘s nothing like glass in those eyes.

Izzy falls back. He sits on his hand to crush the feeling of the rabbit’s little heart out of it, and chokes. Dust sticks to his tears as he cries out there, afraid of what will happen to him when he is on his own without even a jackrabbit to keep him company. He tells himself he has to go back to his family to keep from finding out. But now he knows that it won't do any good. Everyone at home will leave him eventually, whether they want to or not.

A new feeling, like fear of doing a math problem with too many zeroes in it, brings him up and forces him to run back to the road leading into town. He searches a while for his packs, but the deadness of the desert has swallowed them up. He leaves the rifle behind.

Izzy thinks about his family as he runs, about his father who can‘t shoot a gun, his mother who is always keeping him shaded and clean and hydrated, and his sister who showed him that the only good dreams are the ones that don’t come true. They must feel how he feels now, hating that they will leave him one day. He thinks about what he owes them, all the chores he ignored, instead of thinking about what he’s done to the jackrabbit. He can’t understand that he will still have nightmares about that look in its eyes when he is a man, all grown up.