The Metal Rim of Justice

He pushed his little brother out of the way, and moved another brick. He'd seen them, stacked there on the back of the little trailer in the neighbor's yard, and thought they'd be just the thing to support his grand sandbox castle plans. He was six, and lord of all he surveyed. He had no regard for homestead boundaries, treating the entire city block as his carnivale fiefdom. He would off-road his bike across multiple backyards, cursing the Dingers for their unfriendly chain link. He would drift over to the Klingenbergs and pump the two person see saw thing toward the sky, thrilling at the creak of slightly rusty metal. He'd once ridden his bike clear across town; his mother had freaked out, called the cops, but he'd just been puzzled: he may have been more than a mile from home, but HE knew exactly where HE was. Didn't they?

And now, he coveted his neighbor's cinder blocks. Oof, heavy. He carried it over, slid it between the beams of the split rail fence into his yard. His brother pinballed around, giggling for no apparent reason. His cousins, Hope and Travis, told him he was gonna get in trouble while they helped tote bricks. Travis lifted a brick off the back end, and suddenly there was only room in his life for pain. The bricks were holding the little trailer in place; without ballast, the front end came teeter-tottering in his direction, the metal edge of the box frame coming right down upon his big toe, smashing the nail into a bloody pulp. Hope ran screaming in the house, both repulsed and delighted to have bad news to bear. Just before he fainted, he had a thought: maybe I'm not the smartest person in the world, after all. He'd always remember this first lesson, this first hubristic explosion, this first karmic smackdown. But it didn't keep him from learning the same painful lesson, over and over and over, for the rest of his life.