Tesoro comes home with a bullet on a chain around his neck. Not just any bullet, but the bullet, the one that the doctors pried from his ribcage, the one that should have killed him, only it didn’t. It didn’t even look like a bullet anymore. Now, it is a lump of lead, a misshapen mass of grey metal in a small bag dangling above the Marine Corps tattoo on his chest.

“It’s a magic bullet,” he tells his little brother the first night. As he does, his breath reeks of stale blood like the stains on their father’s work clothes after a shift at the meatpacking plant. Saul turns away.

Despite the smell, the ashen hue in Tesoro’s cheek, they are brothers. Saul basks in Tesoro’s machismo and wants to be a Marine one day.

On the mornings after Tesoro’s late nights, Saul sleeps late and skips school. In Garden City, a place of pork and beef processors surrounded by Kansas plains, no one notices, no one wonders about another Latino kid missing school. The teachers lose count of their shifting student body, and Saul becomes less than a number. He sleeps late those mornings. He sleeps easier because the sun is up, warming his bed through the open window. Bad dreams hide during the daylight, so Saul sleeps a black sleep with no dreams.

It happened like this:

Tesoro was on foot patrol in Baghdad. A car exploded, bright flames pushing the sky. The other Marines tensed, took cover. Tesoro didn’t move, watching a woman stream from the flames with a tail of smoke. She screamed louder than the bellow of the burning wreck, and the sound solidified his flesh just long enough. Too long. When the bullet broke through his chest, tearing cloth and skin and bone, his ears lost everything: the screaming woman, his sergeant’s barking voice, the fire, and the crunch of his body on the rocky dust. His ears lost everything except the snap of that bullet, the sound coming after it cut into his body.