America the Beautiful

By Scott T. Hutchison

Forty yards away from the shore where I stood, a bald eagle divebombed the blue, still-topped lake—but, instead of rising majestically from the splash with his catch, he bobbed and flapped the surface in a panicked distress of his own making, his white head plunging under numerous times—I dutifully reacted as something tightened in my chest, and once I’d shucked my shirt and given everything I had stroking my way out to him, I applied the reliable Red Cross technique and approached him from behind, wrapping my well-intentioned arm around his feathered torso before methodically side stroking toward terra firma, him shrieking and hook-billing at my arm the whole time with echoing lake-goers gathering and cheering for me as I made landfall, releasing that soaking-wet bird, his talons sunk meat-deep in maybe a ten pound anchor of bass he shouldn’t have aimed for, everybody shouting how I “saved America!” while I felt kind of bolt-stunned, looking away from my shredded arm that would surely be taken off at the elbow, locking eyes with a symbol, enduring a rugged truth in the hard stare of superior indifference from a mad creature eating his way to freedom, his rescuer and his prey splattered with blood.

Scott T. Hutchison's work has appeared in Vestal Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Georgia Review and The Southern Review.

Art by Jay Baker, an artist from Colorado living in Oregon, by way of New Mexico; he records music as Tom Foe.