Peter Periwinkle

“Peter Periwinkle had a car accident,” my brother said, as if reading it aloud from the back of a cereal box. It took me three full seconds to realize he meant our father. We were on my grandma’s farm where she had recently died, leaving chickens scratching unknowingly in the dust. Our father was elsewhere— broken, back bent like a paperclip, drunk at the wheel when the other car found him. “Peter Periwinkle had a car accident.” He'd meant it to be snide. A small, spiny cartoon creature— ridiculous, expendable— the punchline in a story where no one comes to help. I didn’t laugh. I just pictured a blue hedgehog lying still at the edge of some forgotten road. I hear it now in a different voice— quieter, without the sneer. Peter Periwinkle, still small and lost, still limping along the shoulder of some long-forgotten highway. I don’t excuse my brother for laughing when he said it, but he may have seen something I was too young to name.