A green head poked through the water’s smooth surface, a bull’s-eye of concentric waves. My father called them “river rats.” “They eat fish,” he said. So I never saw the turtle. I never heard about the woman, the Mother of us all, who fell from heaven, who landed on a turtle’s back, who with her twin boys brought mud up from the bottom, and created the Earth. I never saw the turtle. I saw the competition. I saw the enemy. I saw a target. I was a boy who loved his father. So I raised the twenty-two to my shoulder.
"Classic"
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