There’s a little boy, nine years young and sick with wonder, who grows up on William Ave. The little boy doesn’t have a name yet, not one that matches the face he sees when he looks in the mirror. But the little boy does have a big, red, anatomically incorrect heart, and lungs filled with the potential to expand beyond his breast bone, and bright brown eyes the color of mud and sticks. The little boy also has a backyard. And when you’re a little boy, backyards are perfect for adventures. Backyards have tall, uncut grass for critters to hide in, and weeds to stomp through, and flowers to pick for imaginary lovers. Backyards have huge, tall fences that hide you from your neighbors. Backyards have balconies that are also castles and pirate ships and bridges, and backyards have pools that are also oceans and rivers and floods. Front yards are okay too sometimes. Front yards have semi-circle driveways that wrap around the giant tree, the kind of tree that’s somehow woodier than al...
My boy walked in dizzy circles on the piss-stiffened carpet. He was gone already, in a way. His eyes were unseeing, and his already thin frame was now skeletal. And that awful hole in his face, the one that never quite finished scabbing over before he sliced it open again, was tinged with gray, drops of blood and pus leaking out. “Zombie cat” was what we used to call him. We never knew for sure how he got that hole in his face. It took up his entire left cheek, the fur around it crusty and matted. Most likely, and most horribly, it was an attack from his sister. My sweetest girl. I forget, sometimes, how they used to fight. When they were both young and spry, when they’d chase one another up and down the halls, paws batting paws, claws cutting ears and noses. It never troubled us much, their stints of violence. It was much more common to find them curled together in a spiral on the same couch cushion, him a pale orange, her a dark gray; a yin and yang. He was often sickly. Undoubtedly ...