He had shushed Aleks twice already and had crossed a finger over his lips again when Aleks dropped a fork.

            You know your mother doesn’t feel well. Please try to be quiet.

            He washed and Aleks dried and Miroslav put away the dishes from midday. They were nearly done when it fluttered up on the edge of the kitchen table and clung there as if that might be the very end of all the world. It was long and green and Trn noticed it first.

            We have a visitor, he whispered.

            Miroslav said, I believe that’s the biggest grasshopper I’ve ever seen, and Aleks said, Me too.

            It must have come in through the balcony. Miroslav looked out. One of those boys is trimming the grass in the garden. 

            It crouched there, legs cocked, long as Trn’s long finger, bead eyes black and waiting.

Aleks said, I’m not touching that.

            Miroslav reached but it sprang a pale green winding through the kitchen air that brushed against the wall like a paper toy and whirled to rest atop the refrigerator. Watching them with black eyes. As if breathing would give it away.

            Trn took the mixing bowl from the rack and whispered to Aleks to get a sheet of his drawing paper quietly. From behind he laid the bowl over it, lifted the edge while Aleks slid the paper beneath.

            Now. We’ll free him off the balcony.

            The bowl righted, his hand pressed against the lid of paper, he stepped sidewise through the door, waited until Aleks was beside him. You take the paper now, and Aleks did as he held the bowl into the heated afternoon.

            So, Trn said, we did it, and drew the bowl back and cried Ah just as the grasshopper crawled over its edge toward him. He fumbled the bowl in the air as the grasshopper leaped green and bright into the summer calm and whirred over them and veered about and down into the garden as Aleks collapsed against the balcony wall.

            Hurrah! We did it. Ah!

            Hands over his chest he wheezed with laughing.

            Ah!

            He stood, cupping a pretend bowl.

            I’ll show you just what happened. He tilted his palms toward the sky. We did it. Then he leaped back, Ah! and bent double laughing again.

            Trn smiled, crossed his lips with a finger.

            Grandfather, Aleks whispered, his hand on his father’s arm, wait till I show you what Daddy did.

            I’m just glad I didn’t break that bowl.

They went in and Trn closed the door.

Let’s hope we didn’t wake your mother.

            He peered into the hall but the bedroom door stayed closed. He washed the bowl again, dried it, put it silently away himself. 

 

Thomas McConnell’s work has appeared in the Connecticut Review, the Cortland Review, Calabash, Yemassee, the Emrys Journal, the Charleston Post & Courier, Crossroads: A Southern Annual, Writing Macao, and Ars Medica among other publications. His awards include prizes in the Porter Fleming Awards for Fiction, Essay, and Drama, the South Carolina Fiction Project, the H.E. Francis Award, and the Hardagree Award for Fiction. His lectures and readings have taken him to Istanbul, Berlin, and the Sorbonne in Paris. He serves on the editorial advisory board of Hub City Books, a literary press specializing in work of the southern United States.

His collection of stories, A Picture Book of Hell and Other Landscapes, was published by Texas Tech University Press in 2005 and nominated for the PEN/Bingham Award and the John Gardner Award for Short Fiction.

Educated at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and at the University of Georgia, he is professor of English at the University of South Carolina Upstate in Spartanburg, where he also directs the honors program.

A Fulbright Scholar in the Czech Republic for 2005-2006, he completed a novel while lecturing on American literature and creative writing at Masaryk. University.