Like it knows I’m coming for it, the pear snaps off the stem and drops into my palm without me even touching it. It’s all too easy to tell what’s right. What’s right is easy.

My brother Nav and me are stealing pears from Kimley Farm, eight miles from the place our Pops willed to us after diving head first into Cumberland Falls. And sure, the few years since then made us kinder on the outside (me more than Nav), with therapists and grief techniques, with nights of fearless silence under the slick twinkle of stars, with pharmacology and the acceptance that death—the wrong kind of death and the wrong kind of living afterwards—makes you a stranger to those who once knew you. But on the inside, we’re mostly shadow and itch.

We take from Kimley some six dozen pears before the youngest Kimley, the one with a nose like a broken shard of dinner plate, the pretty one, Nav calls her, she comes out huffed and churning with an antique sickle in her hands.

“How many times are we gonna do this?” she says, to me, to my brother who’s shirtless in the truck bed, looking dead past her. I’m holding my hand just below another pear, willing it to fall, which, if it does, will be a clear enough sign to the Kimley girl that no matter what she tells us, the world’s will is stronger. We say “the world” instead of “god” on account of Pops and the way he looked when they fished him out of the river.

Except the Kimley girl says god; she says, “God forgive you, acting like you don’t know us.”

We aren’t acting, but the Kimley girl can’t know our insides. She doesn’t know that a pear can scratch an itch or fill a shadow. I’d like to confess. I’d like to repent to the right authority, but look at the bruise on the fruit, the speckled rust of that alien flesh. What does it have to say in the matter?

So we’ll reap until she puts that curved blade against our bellies, just the same as last time. I’m pulling up my shirt. Nav is whistling in the truck. The fruit is ripe as I’ve ever seen.